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FROM BAPAUME TO 
PASSCHENDAELE 



PHILIP GIBBS 



FROM BAPAUME TO 
PASSCHENDAELE 

On the Western Front, 1917 



BY 

PHILIP GIBBS 

iittiAor of ''The Battles of the Somme" 
"The Soul of the War," etc. 




NEW ^IS^ YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Copyright, 1918, 
By George H. Dorcm Compamy 



JUL 22l9f8 
Printed in the United States of America 



iC!.A501239 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction n 

PART I 

RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 
CHAPTER 

I A New Year of War . . , 39 

II An Attack Near Le Transloy ....... 44 

III The Abandonment of Grandcourt ..... 48 

IV The Gordons in the Butte De Wajrlencourt . . 50 

V The Battle of Boom Ravine 54 

VI The Enemy Withdraws 56 

VII Our Entry Into Gommecourt . 58 

Vin Why the Enemy Withdrew 63 

IX The Australians Enter Bapaume ..... 69 

X The Rescue of Peronne , 76 

PART II 

on the trail of the enemy 

I The Making of No Man's Land 82 

II The Letter of the Law . 85 

III The Abandoned Country ^ . 89 

IV The Cure of Voyennes ......... 93 

V The Chateau of Liancourt ........ 97 

VI The Old Women of Tlncouht ....'... 102 

VII The Agony of War 105 

VIII Cavalry in Action _: . _, . 109 

V 



VI CONTENTS 

PART m 

THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 

CHAPTER „.^„ 

PAGE 

I Arras and the Vimy RrocE u, 

II Londoners through the German Lines .... 124 

III The Struggle Round Monchy . . . . . . . 127 

IV The Other Side of Vimy i,- 

V The Way TO Lens j.^ 

143 

VI The Slaughter at Lagnicourt 15 r 

VII The Terrors of the Scarpe 157 

Vni The Background of Battle .166 

DC How THE Scots Took Guemappe 171 

X The Oppy Line ly. 

XI The Battle of May 3 176 

Xn Fields of Gold ig. 



PART IV 

the battle of messines 

I Wytschaete and Messines 188 

II The Spirit of Victory ig6 

in After tee Earthquake 202 

rv The Effect of the Blow 211 

V Looking Backward 216 

VI The Australians at Messines 220 

VII A Battle in a Thunder-storm 224 

VIII Tece Tragedy at Lombartzyde 228 

IX The Struggle for Hell Wood 233 



CONTENTS vii 
PART V 

THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Breaking the Salient 238 

II From Pilkem Ridge to Hollebeke 245 

III The Beginning of the Rains 251 

rV Pill-Boxes and Machine-Guns 256 

V The Song of the Cockchafers 268 

VT Woods of Ill-Fame 274 

VII The Battle of Langemarck ...... .279 

VIII Capture of Hill Seventy 283 

DC Londoners in Glencorse Wood 293 

X Somersets at Langemarck 298 

XI The Irish in the Swamps 304 

XII The Way through Glencorse Wood 309 

XIII The Slaughter-House of Lens 315 

XIV The Agony of Armentieres 325 

XV The Battle of Menin Road 331 

XVI The Way to Passchendaele 354 

XVII The Battle of Polygon Wood 359 

XVIII Abraham Heights and Beyond 371 

XIX Scenes of Battle . . . ... . . " . . . , 386 

XX The Slough of Despond 396 

XXI The Assaults on Passchendaele 407 

XXII Round Poelcappelle 413 

XXIII The Canadians Come North 428 

XXIV London Men and Artists 447 

XXV The Capture of Passchendaele 451 



MAPS 

PAGE 

Near LeTransloy January 27, 1917 45 

SoissoNS TO Arras. The Line on March 18, 1917 I . . i 71 

-The Line Beyond Arras April II, 19 1 7 134 

Line on April 23, 1917 158 

Line before the Battle of Messines 189 

Panorama of the Country Before Ypres 240 

The Line Around Lens, August 15, 1917 286 

The Line Before Ypres September 27, 191 7 360 

Flanders Front after the Capture of Passchendaele . . 452 

The Retreat from the Somme 462 



uc 



FROM BAPAUME TO 
PASSCHENDAELE 



INTRODUCTION 

191 7. . . . I suppose that a century hence men and women 
will think of that date as one of the world's black years 
flinging its shadow forward to the future until gradually 
new generations escape from its dark spell. To us now, 
only a few months away from that year, above all to those 
of us who have seen something of the fighting which 
crowded every month of it except the last, the colour of 
19 1 7 is not black but red, because a river of blood flowed 
through its changing seasons and there was a great carnage 
of men. It was a year of unending battle on the Western 
Front, which matters most to us because of all our youth 
there. It was a year of monstrous and desperate conflict. 
Looking back upon it, remembering all its days of attack 
and counter-attack, all the roads of war crowded with 
troops and transport, all the battlefields upon which our 
armies moved under fire, the coming back of the prisoners 
by hundreds and thousands, the long trails of the wounded, 
the activity, the traffic, the roar and welter and fury of 
the year, one has a curious physical sensatio'n of breath- 
lessness and heart-beat because of the burden of so many 
memories. The heroism of men, the suffering of individ- 
uals, their personal adventures, their deaths or escape from 
death, are swallowed up in this wild drama of battle so that 
at times it seems impersonal and inhuman like some cosmic 
struggle in which man is but an atom of the world's con- 
vulsion. To me, and perhaps to others like me, who look 



12 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

on at all this from the outside edge of it, going into its fire 
and fury at times only to look again, closer, into the heart 
of it, staring at its scenes not as men who belong to them 
but as witnesses to give evidence at the bar of history — for 
if we are not that we are nothing — and to chronicle the 
things that have happened on those fields, this sense of im- 
personal forces is strong. We see all this in the mass. We 
see its movement as a tide watched from the bank and not 
from the point of view of a swimmer breasting each wave 
or going down in it. Regimental officers and men know 
more of the ground in which they live for a while before 
they go forward over the shell-craters to some barren slope 
where machine-guns are hidden below the clods of soil, or 
a line of concrete blockhouses heaped up with timber and 
sandbags on one of the ridges. They know with a par- 
ticular intimacy the smallest landmarks there — ^the forked 
branch among some riven trees that are called a 'Vood," a 
dead body that lies outside their wire, the muzzle of a 
broken gun that pokes out of the slime, a hummock of earth 
that is a German strong point. They know the stench of 
these places. They know the filth of them, in their dug- 
outs and in their trenches, in their senses and in their souls. 
I and a few others have a view less intimate, and on a wider 
scale. We go to see how our men live in these places, but 
do not stay with them. We go from one battle to another 
as doctors from one case to another, feeling the pulse of it, 
watching its symptoms, diagnosing the prospects of life or 
death, recording its history, as observers and not as the pa- 
tients of war, though we take a few of its risks, and its 
tragedy darkens our spirit sometimes, and the sight of all 
this struggle of men, the thought of all this slaughter and 
sacrifice of youth, becomes at times intolerable and agoniz- 
ing. This broad view of war is almost as wearing to the 
spirit, though without the physical strain, as the closer view 
which soldiers have. The wounded man who comes down 
to the dressing-station after his fight sees only the men 
around him at the time, and it is a personal adventure of 



^ ^ INTRODUCTION 13 

pain limited to his own suffering, and relieved by the joy 
of his escape. But we see the many wounded who stream 
down month after month from the battlefields — for three 
and a half years I have watched the tide of wounded flowing 
back, so many blind men, so many cripples, so many gassed 
and stricken men — and there is something staggering in the 
actual sight of the vastness and the unceasing drift of this 
wreckage of war. So we have seen the fighting in the year 
1917 in the whole sweep of its bloody pageant; and the 
rapidity with which one battle followed another after an 
April day in Arras, the continued fury of gun-fire and in- 
fantry assaults, and the long heroic effort of our men to 
smash the enemy's strength before the year should end, 
left us, as chroniclers of this twelve months' strife, over- 
whelmed by the number of its historic episodes and by its 
human sacrifice. 

The year began with the German retreat from the Somme 
battlefields. It was a withdrawal for strategical reasons — 
the shortening of the enemy's line and the saving of his 
man-power — but also a retreat because it was forced upon 
the enemy by the greatness of his losses in the Somme fight- 
ing. He would not have left the Bapaume Ridge and all 
his elaborate defences down to Peronne and Roye unless 
we had so smashed his divisions by incessant gun-fire and 
infantry assaults that he was bound to economize his power 
for adventures elsewhere. On the ground from which he 
drew back, more hurriedly than he desired because we fol- 
lowed quickly on his heels to Bapaume, he left some of his 
dead. Many of his dead. Below Loupart Wood I saw hun- 
dreds of them, strewn about their broken batteries, and 
lying in heaps of obscene flesh in the wild chaos of earth 
which had been their trenches. On one plot of earth a 
few hundred yards in length there were 800 dead, and over 
all this battlefield one had to pick one's way to avoid tread- 
ing on the bits and bodies of men. From the mud, arms 
stretched out like those of men who had been drowned in 
bogs. Boots and legs were uncovered in the muck-heaps, 



14 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and faces with eyeless sockets on which flies settled, clay- 
coloured faces with broken jaws, or without noses or scalps, 
stared up at the sky or lay half buried in the mud. I fell 
once and clutched a bit of earth and found that I had grasped 
a German hand. It belonged to a body in field-grey stuck 
into the side of a bank on the edge of all this filthy sham- 
bles, ... In the retreat the enemy laid waste the country 
behind him. I have described in this book the completeness 
of that destruction and its uncanny effect upon our senses 
as we travelled over the old No Man's Land through hedges 
of barbed wire and a,cross the enemy's trenches into his 
abandoned strongholds like Gommecourt and Serre, and then 
into open country where German troops had lived beyond 
our gun-fire in French villages still inhabited by civilians. It 
was like wandering through a plague-stricken land aban- 
doned after some fiendish orgy, of men drunk with the 
spirit of destruction. Every cottage in villages for miles 
around had been gutted by explosion. Every church in 
those villages had been blown up. The orchards had been 
cut down and some of the graves ransacked for their lead. 
There had been no mercy for historic little towns like 
Bapaume and Peronne, and in Bapaume the one building 
that stood when we entered — the square tower of the Town 
Hall — was hurled up a week later when a slov/ fuse burnt 
to its end, and only a hole in the ground shows where it had 
been. The enemy left these slow- working fuses in many 
places, and "booby-traps" to blow a man to bits or blind 
him for life if he touched a harmless-looking stick or 
opened the lid of a box, or stumbled over an old boot. One 
of the dirty tricks of war. 

We followed the enemy quickly to Bapaume northwards 
towards Queant, but with only small patrols farther east, 
where he retired in easy stages with rear-guards of machine- 
gunners to his Hindenburg line behind St Quentin. The 
absence of large numbers of British soldiers in this aban- 
doned country scared one. Supposing the enemy were to 
come back in force? It was difficult to know his where- 



INTRODUCTION 15 

abouts. We were afraid of running our cars into his out- 
posts. "Can you tell me where our front line is," asked a 
friend of mine to a sergeant leaning against a ruined wall 
and chatting to a private who stood next to him. The ser- 
geant removed his cigarette from his mouth and with just 
the glint of a smile in his eyes said, "Well, sir, I am the front 
line." It was almost like that for a week or two. I went 
down roads where there was no sign of a trench or a patrol 
and knew that the enemy was^ery close. One felt lonely. 
Sir Douglas Haig did not waste his men in a futile pursuit 
of the enemy. He wanted them elsewhere, and decided that 
the Germans would not return over the roads they had de- 
stroyed by mine-craters to the villages they had laid waste. 
He was concentrating masses of men around Arras for the 
battles which had been planned in the autumn of 'i6. 

The Commander-in-Chief has explained in one of his dis- 
patches how the general plan of campaign for the spring 
offensive was modified because of the German retreat which 
relieved us of another battle of the Ancre. It was read- 
justed also, as he has written, in order to meet the wishes 
of the French Command, so that the attack on the Messines 
Ridge, to be followed by operations against the Flanders 
ridges towards the coast, had to be made secondary to the 
actions around Arras and the Scarpe. They were intended 
to hold a number of German divisions while the French 
undertook their own great offensive in the Champagne under 
the supreme command of General Nivelle. In the Arras 
battles our troops were to do the "team work" for the 
French, and if the combined operations did not produce de- 
cisive results the British Armies might then be transferred 
to Flanders, according to the original plan. It was a handi- 
cap to our own strategical ideas, and was certain to weaken 
our divisions without increasing our prestige before they 
could be sent to Flanders for the most important assaults 
on our length of front. In loyalty to our Allies it was de- 
cided to subordinate our own plan to theirs, and this agree- 
ment was carried out utterly. By bad luck the Italians were 



16 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

not ready to strike at the same time, and the Russian revo- 
lution had already begun to relieve the enemy of his Eastern 
menace, so that the Anglo-French offensive did not have 
the prospect of decisive victory which might have come if 
the German armies had been pressed on all fronts. 

Our regimental officers and men knew nothing of all 
this high strategy, nothing of the international difficulties 
which confronted our High Command. They knew only 
that they had to attack strong and difficult positions and 
that the immediate success depended upon their own leader- 
ship and the courage and training of their men. They were 
sure of that and hoped for a victory which would break the 
German spirit. They devoted themselves to the technical 
details of their work, and only in subconscious thought pon- 
dered over the powers that lie behind the preparations of 
battle and decide the fate of fighting men. The scenes in 
Arras and on the roads that lead to Arras are not to be for- 
gotten by men who lived through them. Below ground as 
well as above ground thousands of soldiers worked night 
and day for weeks before the hour of attack. Above ground 
they were getting many guns into position, making roads, 
laying cables, building huts and camps, hurrying up vast 
stores of material. Below ground they were boring tunnels 
and making them habitable for many battalions, with ven- 
tilation shafts and electric light. All the city of Arras has 
an underground system of vaults and passages dug out in 
the time of the Spanish Netherlands when the houses of the 
citizens were built of stone quarried from the ground on 
which they stood. These subterranean passages were deep- 
ened and lengthened until they went a mile or more beyond 
Arras to the edge of the German front lines. The old 
vaults where the merchants kept their stores were propped 
up and cleaned out, and in this underground world thou- 
sands of our men lived for several days before the battle 
waiting for "zero" hour on April 9, when they would come 
up into the light and see the shell-fire which was now ex- 
ploding above them, unloosing boulders of chalky rock about 



INTRODUCTION 17 

them and shaking the bowels of the earth. The enemy knew 
of our preparations and of this Hfe in Arras, and during 
the week before the battle he flung many shells into the city, 
smashing houses already stricken, "strafing" the station 
and the barracks, the squares and courtyards, and the roads 
that led in and out. During the progress of the battle I 
went many times into the broken heart of Arras while the 
bodies of men and horses lay about where transport columns 
had gone galloping by under fire and while the shrill whine 
of high velocities was followed by the crash of shells among 
the ruins. In the town and below it there were always 
crowds of men during the weeks of fighting outside. I 
went through the tunnels when long columns of soldiers in 
single file moved slowly forward to another day's battle 
in the fields beyond, and when another column came back, 
wounded and bloody after their morning's fight. 

The wounded and the unwounded passed each other in 
these dimly lighted corridors. Their steel hats clinked to- 
gether. Their bodies touched. Wafts of stale air laden 
with a sickly stench came out of the vaults. Faint whiffs 
of poison-gas filtered through the soil above and made men 
vomit. For the most time the men were silent as they 
passed each other, but now and then a wounded man would 
say, "Oh, Christ!" or "Mind my arm, mate," and an un- 
wounded man would pass some remark to the man ahead. 
In vaults dug into the sides of the passages were groups 
of tunnellers and other men half screened by blanket cur- 
tains. Their rifles were propped against the quarried rocks. 
They sat on ammunition boxes and played cards to the light 
of candles stuck in bottles, which made their shadows flicker 
fantastically on the walls. They took no interest in the 
procession beyond their blankets — the walking wounded and 
the troops going up. Some of them slept on the stone floors 
with their heads covered by their overcoats and made pil- 
lows of their gas-masks. Under some old houses of Arras 
were women and children — about 700 of them — among our 
soldiers. They were the people who had lived underground 



18 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

since the beginning of the war and would not leave. Only- 
four of them went away when they were told of the coming 
battle and its dangers. "We will stay," they said with a 
certain pride because they had seen so much war. A few 
women were wounded and one or two killed. Later, after 
the first day's battle, in spite of some high velocities from 
long-range guns, the streets and squares were filled with sol- 
diers, and Arras was tumultuous with the movement of men 
and horses and mules and wagons. The streets seethed with 
Scottish soldiers muddy as they came straight out of battle, 
bloody as they walked in wounded. Many battalions of 
Jocks came into the squares, and their pipers came to play to 
them. I watched the Gordons' pipers march up and down in 
stately ritual, and their colonel, who stood next to me, looked 
at them with a proud light in his eyes as the tune of "High- 
land Laddie" swelled up to the gables and filled the open 
frontages of the gutted houses. Snowflakes fell lightly on 
the steel hats of the Scots in the square, and mud was 
splashed to the khaki aprons over their kilts — no browner 
than their hard lean faces — as a battery rumbled across the 
cobbled place and the drivers turned in their saddles to grin 
at the fine swagger of the pipers and the triumph of the big 
drumsticks. An old woman danced a jig to the pipes, hold- 
ing her skirt above her skinny legs. She tripped up to a 
group of Scottish officers and spoke quick shrill words to 
them. "What does the old witch say," asked a laughing 
Gordon. She had something particular to say. In 1870 
she had heard the pipes in Arras. They were played by 
prisoners from South Germany, and as a young girl she 
had danced to them, ... There was a casualty clearing- 
station in Arras, in a deep high vault like the crypt of a 
cathedral. The way into it was down a long tunnelled pass- 
age, and during the battle thousands of men came here to 
have their wounds dressed. They formed up in queues wait- 
ing their turn and moved slowly down the tunnelled way, 
weary, silent, patient. Outside lay some of the bad cases 
until the stretcher-bearers carried them down, and other? 



INTRODUCTION 19 

sat on the side of the road or lay at full length there, dog- 
weary after their long walk from the battlefields. Blind 
boys were led forward by their comrades, and men with all 
their heads and faces swathed about. They were not out 
of danger even yet, for the enemy hated to leave Arras as a 
health resort, but it was sanctuary for men who had been 
in hell fire up by Monchy. 

The first day of the Arras battle was our victory. We 
struck the enemy a heavy blow, and the capture of the Vimy 
Ridge by the Canadians and the Highland Division was as 
wonderful as the great thrust by English and Scottish bat- 
talions along the valley of the Scarpe across the Arras — 
Cambrai road. By April 14 we had captured 13,000 pris- 
oners and over 200 guns. But it was hard fighting after 
the first few hours of the 9th, and the operations that fol- 
lowed on both sides of the Scarpe were costly to us. The 
London men of the 56th Division, and the old county 
troops of the 3rd and 12th and 37th, and the Scots of the 
15th suffered in heroic fighting against strong and fresh re- 
serves of the enemy who were massed rapidly to check 
them and made fierce, repeated counter-attacks against the 
village of Roeux and its chemical works, north of the Scarpe, 
and against Monchy-le-Preux and Guemappe, south of the 
river. Again and again these counter-attacks were beaten 
back with most bloody losses to the enemy, but our own 
men suffered each time until they were weary beyond 
words. I saw the cavalry ride forward towards Monchy, 
where they came under great fire, and I saw the body of 
their General carried back to Tilloy. It was a day of tragic 
memory. 

At this time, as Sir Douglas Haig has recorded, the bat- 
tle of Arras might have ended. But the French offensive 
was about to begin, and it was important that the full pres- 
sure of the British attacks should be maintained in order to 
assist our Allies. A renewal of the assault was therefore 
ordered, and after a week's postponement to gather together 
new supplies, to change the divisions, and complete the ar- 



20 FROM BAPAmiE TO PASSCHENDAELE 

tillery dispositions, fighting was resumed on a big scale on 
April 23. It was on a front of about nine miles, from 
Croisilles to Gavrelle. Important ground was taken west 
of Cherisy and east of Monchy, where our troops seized 
Infantry Hill, but the violent counter-attacks of the enemy 
in great strength prevented the gain of all our objectives 
on that day, and once more put our troops to a severe 
ordeal. Roeux and Gavrelle on the north of the Scarpe, 
Guemappe on the south, were the focal points of this strug- 
gle and the scene of the bitterest fighting in and out of the 
villages. On April 23 and 24 the enemy made eight sepa- 
rate counter-attacks against Gavrelle, and each was shat- 
tered by our artillery and machine-gun fire. On April 28 
there was another great day of battle when the Canadians 
had fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the village of Arleux,. 
and English troops made progress towards Oppy over Green- 
land Hill and beyond Monchy. Gavrelle was attacked seven 
times more by the enemy, who fell again in large numbers. 
The night attack of May 3 was unlucky in many of its 
episodes because some of our men lost their way in the 
darkness and had the enemy behind them as well as in front 
of them, and suffered under heavy artillery and machine- 
gun fire. It was "team work" for the French, and many 
of our sons fell that day not knowing that their blood was 
the price of loyalty to our Allies and part payment of the 
debt we owe to France for all her valour in this war. On 
May 3 the battle front was extended on a line of sixteen 
miles, and while the 3rd and ist Armies attacked from 
Fontaine-lez-Croisilles to Fresnoy, the 5th Army stormed 
the Hindenburg line near Bullecourt. The Australians car- 
ried a stretch of this Hindenburg line. Cherisy fell into the 
hands of East county battalions, Rceux was entered again by 
English troops, and in Fresnoy, north of Oppy, the Cana- 
dians fought masses of Germans assembled for counter- 
attack and swept them out of the village. Heavy counter- 
attacks developed later, so that our men had to fall back 
from Cherisy and Roeux — Fresnoy was abandoned later — 



INTRODUCTION 21 

t)ut the rest of the ground was held. During this month's 
fighting twenty-three German divisions had been withdrawn 
exhausted from the Hne, and we had captured 19,500 pris- 
oners, 257 guns including 98 heavies, 464 machine-guns, 
227 trench mortars, and a great quantity of war material. 
We advanced our line five miles on a front of over twenty 
miles, including the Vimy Ridge, which had always men- 
aced our positions. Above all, we had drawn upon the 
enemy's strength so that the French armies were relieved of 
that amount of resistance to their offensive against the 
Chemin des Dames. That was the idea behind it all, and it 
succeeded, though the cost was not light. The battle of 
Arras petered out into small engagements and nagging fight- 
ing when on June 7 the battle of Messines began. 

It was a model battle, and the whole operation was as- 
tonishing in the thoroughness of its preparations through 
every detail of organization, in the training of its method of 
attack, in generalship and staff work, and in its Intelligence 
department. The 2nd Army had long held this part of the 
Ypres salient, and knew the enemy's country as well as its 
own. The observers on Kemmel Hill, which looked across 
to Wytschaete Ridge, had watched every movement in the 
enemy's lines, and every sign of new defensive work. Aero- 
plane photographs, stacks of them, revealed many secrets 
of the enemy's life on this high ground which gave him 
observation of all our roads and villages in the flat country 
between Dickebusch and Ypres. A relief map on a big 
scale was built up in a field behind, our lines, and the assault 
troops and their officers walked round it and studied in 
miniature the woods and slopes, strong points and trenches, 
which they would have to attack. For eighteen months 
past Australian and Canadian miners had been at work 
below ground boring deep under the enemy's positions and 
laying charges for the explosion of twenty-four mines. All 
that time the enemy, aware of his danger, had been counter- 
mining, and at Hill 60 there was constant underground 
fighting for more than ten months when men met each other 



22 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

in the converging galleries and fought in their darkness. As 
Sir Douglas Haig has written, at the time of our offensive 
the enemy was known to be driving a gallery which would 
have broken into the tunnel leading into the Hill 60 mines. 
By careful listening it was judged that if our attack took 
place on the date arranged, the enemy's gallery would just 
fail to reach us. So he was allowed to proceed. Eight 
thousand yards of gallery had been bored, and there were 
nineteen mines ready charged with over a million pounds of 
explosives. I saw those nineteen mines go up. The earth 
rocked with a great shudder, and the sky was filled with 
flame. It was the signal of our bombardment to break out in 
a deafening tumult of guns after a quietude in which I 
heard only the snarl of enemy gas-shells and the shunting 
and whistling of our railway engines down below there in 
the darkness as though this battlefield were Clapham Junc- 
tion. Round about the salient a network of railways had 
been built with great speed under the very eyes of the enemy, 
and though he had shelled our tracks and engines he could 
never stop the work of those engineers who laboured with 
fine courage and industry so that the guns might not lack 
for shells nor the men for supplies on the day of attack. 
The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a fine victory 
for us, breaking the evil spell of the Ypres salient in which 
our men had sat down so long under direct observation of 
the enemy on that ridge above them. Kemmel Hill, which 
had been under fire in our lines for three years, became a 
health resort for Australian boys whose turn to fight had 
not yet come, and they sat on top of the old observation- 
post where men had hidden below ground to watch through 
a slit in the earth, staring through field-glasses at the sweep 
of fire from Oostaverne to Pilkem, and eating sweets, and 
putting wild flowers in their slouch hats. Dickebusch lost 
its horror. The road to Vierstraat was no longer bracketed 
by German shells, and there was no further need of camou- 
flage screens along other roads where notice-boards said: 
Drive slowly — dust draws fire. On the morning of battle 



INTRODUCTION 23 

after the capture of the ridge an Irish brigadier sat outside 
his dug-out on a kitchen chair before a deal table, where his 
maps were spread. "It's good to take the fresh air," he said. 
"Yesterday I had to keep below ground." All that made a 
difference on the right of the salient, but Ypres was still 
"a hot shop," as the men say, and the roads out of Ypres — 
the Lille road and the Menin road — were as abominable as 
ever, and worse than ever when at the end of July the battles 
of Flanders began. 

The Wytschaete — Messines Ridge is the eastern spur of 
that long range of "abrupt isolated hills," to use the words 
of Sir Douglas Haig, which divides the valleys of the Lys 
and the Yser, and links up with the ridges stretching north- 
eastwards to the Ypres — Menin road, and then northwards 
to Passchendaele and Staden. One of the objects of our 
campaign in 19 17 was to gain the high ground to Passchen- 
daele and beyond. A mere glance at a relief map is enough 
to show the formidable nature of the positions held by the 
enemy on those slopes which dominated our low ground. 
When one went across the Yser Canal along the Menin 
road, or towards the Pilkem Ridge, those slopes seemed like 
a wall of cliffs barring the way of our armies, however 
strongly our tide of men might dash against them. The 
plan to take them by assault needed enormous courage and 
high faith in the mind of any man who bore the burden 
of command, and his faith and courage depended utterly on 
the valour of the men who were to carry out his plan 
against those frowning hills. The men did not fail our 
High Command, and for three and a half months those 
troops of ours fought with a heroic resolution never sur- 
passed by any soldiers in the world, and hardly equalled, 
perhaps, in all the history of war, against terrible gun-fire 
and innumerable machine-guns, in storms and swamps, in 
bodily misery because of the mud and wet, in mental suffer- 
ing because of the long strain on their nerve and strength, 
with severe casualties because of the enemy's fierce re- 
sistance, but with such passionate and self-sacrificing cour- 



24 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

age that the greatest obstacles were overcome, and the enemy- 
was beaten back from one line of defence to another with 
large captures of prisoners and guns until, in the middle of 
November, the crest of Passchendaele was gained. 

Before the first day of the battle the 5th Army, with the 
1st French Army on its left, below the flooded ground of 
St.-Jansbeek, crossed the Yser Canal and seized 3000 yards 
of the enemy's trench system. During that night the pioneer 
battalion of the Guards, working under fierce fire, built 
seventeen bridges across the canal for the passage of our 
troops on the day of assault. On that day, July 31, at 3.50 
in the morning, battle was engaged on a front of fifteen 
miles from Boesinghe to the River Lys, where the 2nd Army- 
was making a holding attack on our right wing. The Ger- 
man front-line system of defence was taken everywhere. 
Our troops captured the Pilkem Ridge on the left, Veloren- 
hoek, the Frezenberg Redoubt, the Pommern Redoubt, and 
St.-Julien north of the Ypres — Roulers railway, and were 
fighting forward against fierce resistance on both sides of 
the Ypres — Menin road. They stormed through Sanctuary 
Wood and captured Stirling Castle, Hooge, and the Belle- 
waerde Ridge, and by the end of the day had gained the 
crest of Westhoek Ridge. On the 2nd Army front the New- 
Zealanders carried the village of La Basseville after close 
fighting, which lasted fifty minutes, and English troops on 
their left captured Hollebeke and difficult ground north of 
the Ypres — Comines Canal. Over 6000 prisoners, includ- 
ing 133 officers, surrendered to us that day. 

It was in the afternoon of the first day that the luck of 
the weather, was decided against us and there began those 
heavy rain-storms which drenched the battlefields in August 
and made them dreadful for men and beasts. All this part 
of Flanders is intersected by small streams or "beeks," fil- 
tering through the valleys between the ridges, and our ar- 
tillery-fire had already caused them to form ponds and 
swamps by destroying their channels so that they slopped 
over the low-lying ground. The rains enlarged this area of 



INTRODUCTION 25 

flood, and so saturated the clayey soil that It became a vast 
bog with deep overbrimming pits where thousands of shell- 
craters had pierced the earth. Tracks made of wooden slabs 
fastened together were the only roads by which men and 
pack-mules could cross this quagmire, and each of these 
ways became taped out by the enemy's artillery, and very 
perilous. They were slippery under moist mud, and men 
and mules fell into the bogs on either side, and sometimes 
drowned in them. At night in the darkness and the storms 
it was hard to find the tracks and difficult to keep to them, 
and long columns of troops staggered and stumbled forward 
with mud up to their knees if they lost direction, and mud 
up to their necks if they fell into the shell-holes. It was 
over such ground as this, in such intolerable conditions, that 
our men fought and won their way across the chain of 
ridges which led to Passchendaele. I saw some of the 
haunting scenes of this struggle and went over the ground 
across the Pilkem Ridge, and along the Ypres — Menin road 
to Westhoek Ridge, and up past Hooge to the bogs of Glen- 
corse Wood and Inverness Copse, and beyond the Yser 
Canal to St. -Jean and Wieltje, where every day for months 
our gunners went on firing, and every day the enemy "an- 
swered back" with scattered and destructive fire, searching 
for our batteries and for the bodies of our men. The broken 
skeleton of Ypres was always in the foreground or the 
background of this scene of war, and every day it changed 
in different atmospheric phases and different hours of light 
so that it was never the same in its tragic beauty. Some- 
times it was filled with gloom and shadows, and the tattered 
masonry of the Cloth Hall, lopped off at the top, stood black 
as granite above its desolate boulder-strewn square. Some- 
times when storm-clouds were blown wildly across the sky 
and the sunlight struck through them, Ypres would be all 
white and glamorous, like a ghost city in a vision of the 
world's end. At times there was a warm glow upon its rain- 
washed walls, and they shone like burnished metal. Or 
they were wrapped about with a thick mist stabbed through 



26 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

by flashes of red fire from heavy guns, reveahng in a mo- 
ment's glare the sharp edges of the fallen stonework, the 
red ruins of the prison and asylum, the huddle of shell- 
pierced roofs, and that broken tower which stands as a 
memorial of what once was the splendour of Ypres. A mili- 
tary policeman standing outside the city gave an order to 
all going in : "Gas-masks and steel hats to be worn," and 
at that moment when one fumbled at the string of one's 
gas-bag and fastened the strap of a steel hat beneath one's 
chin, the menace of war crept close and the evil of it 
touched one's senses. It was very evil beyond the Lille 
gate and the Menin gate, where new shell-holes mingled 
with old ones, and men walked along the way of death. 
The spirit of that evil lurked about the banks of the Yser 
Canal with its long fringe of blasted trees, white and livid, 
with a leprous look when the sunlight touched their stumps. 
The water of the canal was but a foul slime stained with 
gobs of colour. The wreckage of bridges and barges lay 
in it. In its banks were unexploded shells and deep gashes 
where the bursts had torn the earth down, and innumer- 
able craters. The Yser Canal holds in a ghostly way the 
horror of this war. Yet it is worse beyond. Out through 
the Menin gate the view of the salient widens, and every 
yard of the way is bleeding with the memory of British 
soldiers who walked and fought and died here since the 
autumn of '14. How many of them we can hardly guess 
or know. The white crosses of their graves are scattered 
about the shell-churned fields and the rubbish-heaps of 
brick, though many were never buried, and many were taken 
back by stretcher-bearers who risked their lives to bring in 
these bodies. There is no house where the White Chateau 
used to be. There is no grange by the Moated Grange 
where men crept out at night, crawling on their stomachs 
when the flares went up. Hundreds of thousands of men 
have gone up to Hell-fire Corner, some of them with a cold 
sweat in the palms of their hands and brave faces and an 
act of sacrifice in their hearts. It was the way to Hooge. 



INTRODUCTION STt 

It was a comer of the hell that was here always under 
German guns and German eyes from the ridge beyond. 
They had high ground all around us, as the country goes 
up from Observatory Ridge and Sanctuary Wood and 
Bellewaerde to the Westhoek Ridge and the high plateau 
of Polygon Wood. No men of ours could move in the 
daylight without being seen. The Menin road was always 
under fire. Every bit of broken barn, every dug-out and 
trench, was a mark for the enemy's artillery. During the 
Flanders fighting all this ground was still in the danger 
zone, though the enemy lost much of his direct observa- 
tion after our first advance. But he was still trying to find 
the old places and hurled over big shells in a wild scat- 
tered way. They flung up black fountains of earth with 
frightful violence. Everywhere there were shell-holes so 
deep that a cart and horse would find room in them. One 
looked into these gulfs with beastly sensations — with a kind 
of animal fear at the thought of what would happen to a 
man if he stood in the way of such an explosion. There 
was a sense of old black brooding evil about all this coun- 
try, and worst of all in remembrance were the mine-craters 
of Hooge. I stared into those pits all piled with stinking 
sand-bags on which fungus grew, and thought of friends 
of mine who once lived here, with the enemy a few yards 
away from them, with mines and saps creeping close to 
them before another upheaval of the earth, with corpses 
and bits of bodies rotting half buried where they sat, al- 
ways wet, always lousy, in continual danger of death. The 
mines went up and men fought for new craters over new 
dead. The sand-bags silted down after rain, and ma- 
chine-gun bullets swept through the gaps, and men sank 
deeper into this filth and corruption. The place is aban- 
doned now, but the foulness of it stayed, with a lake of 
slime in which bodies floated, and the same old stench rose 
from its caverns and craters. Bellewaerde Lake, to the 
north of Hooge, is not what it used to be when gentlemen 
of Ypres came out here to shoot wild-fowl or walk through 



28 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Chateau Wood around the White Chateau of Hooge with a 
dog and a gun. There are still stumps of trees, shot and 
mangled by three years of fire, but no more wood than 
that, and the lake is a cesspool into which the corruption 
of death has flowed. Its water is stained with patches of 
red and yellow and green slime, and shapeless things float 
in it. Beyond is the open ground which goes up to West- 
hoek Ridge above Nonne Boschen and Glencorse Wood, 
for which our men fought on the first day of battle and 
afterwards in many weeks of desperate struggle. The Aus- 
tralians took possession of this country for a time and had 
to stay and hold it after the excitement of advance. They 
came winding along the tracks in single file through this 
newly captured ground, carrying their lengths of duck- 
board and ammunition boxes with just a grim glance to- 
wards places where shells burst with monstrous whoofs. 
"A hot spot," said one of these boys, crouching with his 
mates in a bit of battered trench outside a German pill-box 
surrounded by dead bodies. Our guns were firing from 
many batteries, and flights of shells rushed through the 
air from the heavies a long way back and from the field- 
guns forward. It was the field-guns which hurt one's 
ears most with their sharp hammer-strokes. Now and again 
a little procession passed to which all other men gave way. 
It was a stretcher-party carrying a wounded man shoulder 
high. There is something noble and steady about these 
bearers, and when I see them I always think of Greek heroes 
carried back on their shields. There was a vapour of poison 
gas about these fields, not strong enough to kill, but mak- 
ing one's €yes and skin smart. The Australians did not 
seem to notice it. Perhaps the stench of dead horses over- 
whelmed their nostrils. It was strong and foul. The car- 
casses of these poor beasts lay about as they had been hit 
by shrapnel or shell splinters, and down one track came a 
living horse less lucky than these, bleeding badly from its 
wounds and ambling slowly with drooping head and glazed 
eyes. Worse smells than of dead horse crept up from the 



INTRODUCTION 29 

battered trenches and dug-outs, where Glencorse Wood goes 
down to Inverness Copse. It was the dreadful odour of 
dead men. It rose in gusts and waves and eddies over all 
this ground, for the battlefield was strewn with dead. I 
saw many German bodies in the fields of the Somme, and 
on the way out from Arras, and on the Vimy Ridge, but 
never in such groups as lay about the pill-boxes and the 
shell-craters of the salient. Everywhere they lay half bur- 
ied in the turmoil of earth, or stark above ground with- 
out any cover to hide them. They lay with their heads flung 
back into water-filled craters or with their legs dangling 
in deep pools. They were blown into shapeless masses of 
raw flesh by our artillery. Heads and legs and arms all 
coated in clay lay without bodies far from where the men 
of whom they had been part were killed. God knows what 
agonies were suffered before death by men shut up in those 
German blockhouses, like Fitzclarence Farm, and Herent- 
hage Chateau, and Clapham Junction, which I passed on 
the way up. Some of the garrisons had not stayed in the 
blockhouses until our troops had reached them. Perhaps 
the concussion of our drum-fire was worse inside those 
concrete walls than outside. Perhaps the men had rushed 
out hoping to surrender before our troops were on them, 
or with despairing courage had brought their machine- 
guns into the open to kill our first waves before their own 
death. Whatever their motive had been, many of these 
men had come out, and they lay in heaps, mangled by 
shell-fire that came across the fields to them in a deep belt 
of high explosives. Here under the sky they lay, a fright- 
ful witness against modern civilization, a bloody challenge 
to any gospel of love which men profess to believe. Over 
Nonne Boschen and Inverness Copse, and Polygon Wood 
beyond, and the long claw-like hook of the Passchendaele 
Ridge, the sky was clear at times and the water-pools re- 
flected its light. But these places had no touch of loveli- 
ness because of the light. Once in history meek-eyed 
women walked in Nonne Boschen, which was Nun's Wood, 



30 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and in Inverness Copse, as we call it, maids went with their 
mates in the glades. Now they are places haunted by 
ghastly memories, and there rises from them a miasma 
which sickens one's soul. Yet bright above the evil of 
them and clean above their filth there is the memory of that 
youth of ours who came here through fire and flame and 
fell here, so that the soil is sacred as their field of honour. 
In the first phase of the battle of Flanders the new sys- 
tem of German defence was formidable. It was that ''elas- 
tic system" by which Hindenburg hoped to relieve his men 
from the destructive fire of our artillery by holding his 
front line thinly in concrete blockhouses and organized shell- 
craters with enfilade positions for machine-gun fire, keep- 
ing his local reserves at quick striking distance for counter- 
attack. Our first waves of men flowed past and between 
these blockhouses in their struggle to attain their objectives, 
and were swept by cross-fire as they went forward, so that 
they were thinned out by the time they had reached the 
line of their advance. The succeeding waves were some- 
times checked by German machine-gunners still holding 
out in undamaged shelters, and our troops in the new front 
line, weak and exhausted after hours of fighting, found 
themselves exposed to fierce counter-attacks in front while 
groups of the enemy were still behind them. For several 
weeks there were episodes of this kind, when our men had to 
give ground, though the line of advance seldom ebbed back 
to its starting line, and some progress was made however 
great the difficulties. Still the "pill-box" trouble was a seri- 
ous menace, costly in life, and new methods of attack had to 
be devised- during the progress of fighting when the area of 
the 2nd Army was extended on our left so that the 5th 
Army was relieved of some of its broad battle front. Our 
heavy howitzers concentrated on every blockhouse that 
could be located by aeroplane photographs or direct ob- 
servation, with such storms of explosive that if they were 
not destroyed the garrisons of machine-gunners inside were 
killed or stupefied by concussion. Our method of attack in 



INTRODUCTION 31 

depth, as at Wytschaete and Messines — battalions advanc- 
ing in close support of each other, so that the final objec- 
tive was held by fresh troops to meet the inevitable counter- 
attacks — succeeded in a most striking way, in spite of the 
fearful condition of the ground. The enemy changed his 
new method of defence to meet this new method of attack. 
He went back to strongly held lines with support troops 
close forward, and had to pay the penalty by heavier losses 
under our artillery. The abominable weather and state of 
ground were his best lines of defence, and in August and 
October he had astounding luck. 

Through all these battles our men were magnificent — 
not demi-gods, nor saints with a passion for martyrdom, 
nor heroes of melodrama facing death with breezy non- 
chalance while they read sweet letters from blue-eyed girls, 
but grim in attack and stubborn in defence, getting on with 
the job — a damned ugly job — as far as the spirit could 
pull the body and control the nerves. They were indus- 
trious as ants on this great muck-heap of the battlefield. 
Transport drivers, engineers, signallers, and pioneers la- 
boured for victory as hard as infantry and gunners, and 
worked, for the most part, in evil places where there was 
always a chance of being torn to rags. The gunners, with 
their wheels sunk to the axles, served their batteries until 
they were haggard and worn, and they had little sleep and 
less comfort, and no hour of safety from infernal fire. 
They were wet from one week to another. They stood 
to the tags of their boots in mud. They had many 
of their guns smashed to spokes and splinters. They 
were lucky if lightly wounded. But their barrage-fire rolled 
ahead of the infantry at every attack and they shattered 
the enemy's divisions. The stretcher-bearers seemed to 
give no thought to their own lives in the rescue of the 
wounded; and down behind the lines — not always beyond 
range of gun-fire — doctors and hospital orderlies and nurses 
worked in the dressing-stations with the same dogged in- 
dustry and courage as men who carried up duck-boards to 



32 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the line, drove teams of pack-mules up tracks under fire, 
or unloaded shells from trains that went puffing to the edge 
of the battlefields. It was all part of the business of war. 
Wounded men who came back from battle were dealt with 
as so many cases of damaged goods, to be packed off speed- 
ily to make way for others. There was no time for senti- 
ment — and no need of it. I used to go sometimes to an old 
mill-house on days of battle. During the Flanders fighting 
thousands of wounded men came to this place as a first 
stage on their journey to base hospitals. The lightly 
wounded used to sit in a long low tent beside the mill, 
round red-hot braziers, waiting in turn to have their wounds 
dressed. These crowds of men were of many battalions and 
of all t3^es of Enghsh, Scottish, and Irish troops, with 
smaller bodies of Australians, New-Zealanders, Canadians, 
South-Africans, Newfotmdlanders. They were clotted with 
mud and blood, and numb and stiff until the warmth of 
the braziers unfroze them. They sat silent as a rule, with 
their steel hats tilted forward, but there was hardly a groan 
from them, and never a whimper, nor any curse against the 
fate that had hit them. If I questioned them they answered 
with a stark simplicity of truth about the things they had 
seen and done, with often a queer glint of humour — ^grim 
enough, God knows, but humour still — in their tale of es- 
cape from death. Always after a talk with them I came 
away with a deep belief that the courage, honesty, and hu- 
manity of these boys were a world higher than the Philoso- 
phy of their intellectual leaders, and I hated the thought 
that we have been brought to such a pass by the infamy of 
an enemy caste, and by the low ideals of Europe which 
have been our own law of life, that all this splendid youth, 
thinking straight, seeing straight, acting straight, without 
selfish motives, with clean hearts and fine bodies, should be 
flung into the furnace of war and scorched by its fires, 
and maimed, and blinded, and smashed. Only by the dire 
need of defence against the enemies of the world's liberty 
can such a sacrifice be justified, and that is our plea before 



INTRODUCTION 3S 

the great Judge of Truth. Such thoughts haunt one if one 
has any conscience, but when I went among the troops on 
the roads or in their camps, and heard their laughter after 
battle or before it, and saw the courage of men refusing 
to be beaten down by the vilest conditions or heavy losses, 
and was a witness of their pride in the achievements of 
their own battalions, I wondered sometimes whether the 
sufferings of these men were not so pitiful as I had thought. 
Their vitality helps them through many hardships. Their 
interest in life is so great that until death comes close it 
does not touch them — not many of them — with its coldness. 
In their comradeship they find a compensation for discom- 
fort, and their keenness to win the rewards of skill and 
pluck is so high that they take great risks sometimes as 
a kind of sport, as Arctic explorers or big game hunters will 
face danger and endure great bodily suffering for their own 
sake. Those men are natural soldiers, though all our men 
are not like that. There are some even who like war, though 
very few. But most of them would jeer at any kind of pity 
for them, because they do not pity themselves, except in 
most dreadful moments which they put away from their 
minds if they escape. They scorn pity, yet they hate worse 
still, with a most deadly hatred, all the talk about "our 
cheerful men." For they know that however cheerful they 
may be it is not because of a jolly life or lack of fear. 
They loathe shell-fire and machine-gun fire. They know 
what it is "to have the wind up." They have seen what 
a battlefield looks like before it has been cleared of its dead. 
It is not for non-combatants to call them "cheerful." Be- 
cause non-combatants do not understand and never will, not 
from now until the ending of the world. "Not so much 
of your cheerfulness," they say, and "Cut it out about the 
brave boys in the trenches." So it is difficult to describe 
them, or to give any idea of what goes on in their minds, 
for they belong to another world than the world of peace 
that we knew, and there is no code which can decipher their 
secret, nor any means of self-expression on their lips. 



34 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

In this book the messages which I wrote from day to day 
are reprinted with only one alteration — ^though some are 
left out. For reasons of space (there is a limit to the 
length of a book) I have not included any narrative of 
the Cambrai battles, and thought it best to end this book 
with the gain of Passchendaele. The alteration is one which 
makes me very glad. I have been allowed to give the names 
of the battalions, which I could not do during the progress 
of the fighting because the enemy wanted to know our 
Order of Battle. For the first time, therefore, the world 
will know the regiments who fought without fame in the 
dismal anonymity of this war, with such Spartan courage, 
up to that high crest of Passchendaele which was their goal, 
beyond the bogs and the beeks where masses of men strug- 
gled and fell. There is no criticism in this book, no judg- 
ment of actions or men, no detailed summing up of success 
and failure. That is not within my liberty or duty as a 
correspondent with the Armies in the Field. The Com- 
mander-in-Chief himself has summarized the definite gains 
of the campaign in Flanders: 

"Notwithstanding the many difficulties, much has been 
achieved. Our captures in Flanders since the commence- 
ment of operations at the end of July amount to 20,065 
prisoners, 74 guns, 941 machine-guns, and 131 trench- 
mortars. It is certain that the enemy's losses greatly ex- 
ceeded ours. Most important of all, our new and hastily 
trained armies have shown once again that they are capable 
of meeting and beating the enemy's best troops, even under 
conditions which required the greatest endurance, deter- 
mination, and heroism to overcome. The total number of 
prisoners taken in 1917, between the opening of the spring 
offensive on April 9 and the conclusion of the Flanders 
offensive, not including those captured in the battle of Cam- 
brai, was 57,696, including 1290 officers. During the same 
period we captured also 109 heavy guns, 560 trench-mortars 
and 1976 machine-guns." 



INTRODUCTION 35 

These are great gains in men and material, and the cap- 
ture of the ridges has given us strong defensive positions 
which should be of high value to us in the new year of 
warfare calling to our men, unless the world's agony is 
healed by the coming of Peace. 

[/ am indebted to Mr. Robert Donald, editor of the 
Daily Chronicle, for permission to republish the articles 
which I have written for that newspaper as a war corre- 
spondent with the British Army in the Field. My letters 
from the Front also appeared in the Daily Telegraph and 
a number of Provincial, American, and Colonial papers, 
and I am grateful for the honour of serving the great public 
of their readers.'] 



FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 



PART I 
RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 

I 

A New Year of War 

New Year's Eve^ 191 6 
Last New Year's Eve — the end of a year which had been 
full of menace for our fighting men, because, at the be- 
ginning, our lines had no great power of guns behind them, 
and full of hopes that had been unfilled, in spite of all their 
courage and all their sacrifice — an artillery officer up in the 
Ypres salient waited for the tick of midnight by his wrist- 
watch (it gave a glow-worm light in the darkness), and 
then shouted the word "Fire !" . . . One gun spoke, and then 
for a few seconds there was silence. Over in the German 
line the flares went up and down, and it was very quiet in 
the enemy trenches, where, perhaps, the sentries wondered 
at that solitary gun. Then the artillery officer gave the 
word of command again. This time the battery fired nine 
rounds. A little while there was silence again, followed by 
another solitary shot, and then by six rounds. So did the 
artillery in the Ypres salient salute the birth of the New 
Year, born in war, coming to our soldiers and our race 
with many days of battle, with new and stern demands for 
the lives and blood of men. 

To-night it is another New Year's Eve, and the year is 
coming to us with the same demands and the same promises, 
and the only difference between our hopes upon this night 
and that of a year ago is that by the struggle and endeavour 
of those past twelve months the ending is nearer in sight and 

39 



40 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the promise very near — very near as we hope and beheve — 
its fulfilment. The guns will speak again to-night, saluting 
by the same kind of sullen salvo the first day of the last year 
of war. The last year, if we have luck. It is raining now, 
a soft rain swept gustily across the fields by a wind so mild 
after all our wild weather that it seems to have the breath 
of spring in it. For a little while yesterday this mildness, 
and the sunlight lying over the battlefields, and a strange, 
rare inactivity of artillery, gave one just for one second of 
a day-dream a sense that Peace had already come and that 
the victory had been won. It was queer. I stood looking 
upon Neuville-St.-Vaast and the Vimy Ridge. Our trenches 
and the enemy's wound along the slopes in wavy lines of 
white chalk. There to my right was the Labyrinth and in 
a hollow the ruins of Souchez. When I had first come to 
these battlefields they were strewn with dead — French dead 
— after fighting frightful and ferocious in intensity. Unex- 
ploded shells lay everywhere, and the litter of great ruin, 
and storms of shells were bursting upon the Vimy Ridge. 

The last time I went to these battlefields the high ridge 
of Vimy was still aflame, and British troops were attacking 
the mine-craters there. Yesterday all the scene was quiet, 
and bright sunlight gleamed upon the broken roofs of Neu- 
ville, and the white trenches seemed abandoned. The wet 
earth and leaves about me in a ruined farmyard had the 
moist scent of early spring. A man was wandering up a 
road where six months ago he would have been killed be- 
fore he had gone a hundred yards. Lord! It looked like 
peace again! ... It was only a false mirage. There was 
no peace. ' Presently a battery began to fire. I saw the 
shells bursting over the enemy's position. Now and again 
there was the sullen crump of a German "heavy." And 
though the trenches seemed deserted on either side they 
were held as usual by men waiting and watching with ma- 
chine-guns and hand-grenades and trench-mortars. There 

is no peace! 

* * * * 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 41 

It was enormously quiet at times in Arras. The footsteps 
of my companion were startling as they clumped over the 
broken pavement of the square, and voices — women's voices 
— coming up from some hole in the earth sounded high and 
clear, carrying far, in an unearthly way, in this great awful 
loneliness of empty houses, broken churches, ruined banks 
and shops and restaurants, and mansions cloistered once in 
flower gardens behind high white walls. I went towards 
the women's voices as men in darkness go towards any glim- 
mer of light, for warmth of soul as well as of body. 

A woman came up a flight of stone steps from a vaulted 
cellar and stared at me, and said, "Good day. Do you look 
for anything?" 

I said, "I look only into your cellar. It is strange to find 
you living here. All alone — ^perhaps." 

"It is no longer strange to me. I have been here, as you 
say, alone, all through the war, since the day of the first 
bombardment. That was on October 6, 1914. Before then 
I was not alone. I was married. But my husband was 
killed over there — ^you see the place where the shell fell. 
Since then I am alone." 

For two years and two months she and other women of 
Arras — one came now to stand by her side and nod at her 
tale — have lived below ground, coming up for light and air 
when there is a spell of such silence as I had listened to, and 
going down to the dark vaults when a German "crump" 
smashes through another roof, or when German gas steals 
through the streets with the foul breath of death. 

I asked her about the Kaiser's offer of peace. What did 
she think of that? I wondered what her answer would be — 
this woman imprisoned in darkness, hiding under daily 
bombardments, alone in the abomination of desolation. It 
was strange how quickly she was caught on fire by a sudden 
passion. All the tranquillity of her face changed, and there 
were burning sparks in her eyes. She was like a woman of 
the Revolution, and her laughter, for she began her answer 
with a laugh, was shrill and fierce. 



42 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

"Peace! William offers peace, you say? Bah! It is 
nothing but humbug [la blague]. It is a trap which he sets 
at our feet to catch us. It is a lie." 

She grasped my arm, and with her other hand pointed to 
the ruins over the way, to the chaos of old houses, once very 
stately and noble, where her friends lived before the fires 
of hell came. 

"The Germans did that to us. They are doing it now. 
But it is not enough. What they have done to Arras they 
want to do to France — to smash the nation to the dust, to 
break the spirit of our race as they have broken all things 
here. They wish to deceive us to our further ruin. There 
will be no peace until Germany herself is laid in ashes, and 
her cities destroyed like Arras is destroyed, and her women 
left alone, with only the ghosts of their dead husbands, as 
I live here alone in my cellar. Peace ! Je m'en fiche de ga !" 

There was a queer light in her eyes for a moment, in the 
eyes of this woman of Arras who saw down a vista of two 
years and two months all the fire and death that had been 
hurled into this city around her, and the bodies of little 
children in the streets, and her dead husband lying there 
on the cobble-stones, where now there was a great hole in 
the roadway piercing through to the vaults. 



I met other women of Arras. Two of them were young, 
daintily dressed as though for the boulevards of Paris, and 
they walked, swinging little handbags, down a street where 
at any moment a shell might come to tear them to pieces 
and make rags of them. Another was a buxom woman with 
a boy and girl holding her hands. The boy had been bom 
to the sound of shell-fire. The girl was eight years old, 
but she now learns the history of France, not only out of 
school books, but out of this life in the midst of war. 

"They are frightened — the little ones?" I asked. A soli- 
tary gun boomed and shook the loose stones of a ruined 
house. The woman smiled and shrugged her shoulders. 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 43 

'They are used to it all. Peace will seem strange to 
them." 

**Will there ever be peace ?'T asked. 

The woman of Arras looked for a moment like the one 
I had spoken to on the steps of the cellar. Then she smiled, 
in a way that made me feel cold, for it was the smile of a 
woman who sees a vengeance for the wreckage of her life. 

"There is no peace at Verdun," she said. "Our soldiers 
have done well there." 

I said good day to her and went through the ruins again 
and out of the city, and stood watching an artillery duel 
up towards Souchez. The stabs of flame from our bat- 
teries were like red sparks in the deepening mist. They 
were like the fire in the eyes of the women who lived in 
cellars away back there in Arras, with a smouldering pas- 
sion in the gloom and coldness of their lives. 
* * * * 

In many French villages the pipes are playing the New 
Year in, and their notes are full of triumph, but with a crj 
in them for those who have gone away with the old year, 
lying asleep on the battlefields — so many brave Scots — like 
"the flowers o' the forest" and last year's leaves. I heard 
the pipes to-day in one old barn, where a feast was on, not 
far from where the guns were shooting through the mist 
with a round or two at odd r:oments, and though I had had 
one good meal, I had to eat another, even to the Christmas 
plum pudding, just to show there was no ill-feeling. 

It was the pudding that threatened to do me down. 

But it was good to sit among these splendid Seaforths 
and their feast, all packed together shoulder to shoulder, and 
back to back, under high old beams that grew in French 
forests five centuries ago. They were the transport men, 
who get the risks but not the glory. Every man here had 
ridden, night after night, up to the lines of death, under 
shell-fire and machine-gun fire, up by Longueval and Ba- 
zentin, carrying food for men and guns at their own risk 
of life. Every night now they go up again with more food 



44 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

for men and guns through places where there are now shell- 
craters in the roads, and the reek of poison gas. 

The young transport officer by my side (who once went 
scouting in Delville Wood when the devil had it all his own 
way there) raised his glass of beer (the jug from which it 
had been poured stood a yard high in front of me) and 
wished "Good luck" to his men in the New Year of war, 
and bade them "wire in" to the feast before them. So in 
other Scottish billets the first of the New Year was 
kept, and to-night there is sword-dancing by kilted men as 
nimble as Nijinski, in their stockinged feet, and old songs 
of Scotland which are blown down the wind of France, in 
this strange nightmare of a war where men from all the 
Empire are crowded along the fighting-lines waiting for the 
bloody battles that will come, as sure as fate, while the New . 
Year is still young. 

3|C 3|C ^ 3jC 

The queerest music I have heard in this war zone was 
three days ago, when I was walking down a city street. 
The city was dead, killed by storms of high explosives. 
The street was of shuttered houses, scarred by shell-fire, 
deserted by all their people, who had fled two years ago. 
I walked down this desolation, so quiet, so dead, where there 
was no sound of guns, that it was like walking in Pompeii 
when the lava was cooled. Su^Menly there was the sound of 
a voice singing loud and clear with birdlike trills, as tri- 
umphant as a lark's song to the dawn. It was a woman's 
voice singing behind the shutters of a shelled city! . . . 

Some English officer was there with his gramophone. 



2 

An Attack Near Le Transloy 

January 28, 191 7 
The "show" (as our men call it) near Le Transloy yes- 
terday was more than a raid — those daily in-and-out dashes 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 



45 



which are doing most deadly work along our line. It was an 
attack for the definite purpose of gaining an important bit 
of ground on the slope which goes down to the ruined vil- 
lage and of driving the enemy out of some strong points. 
The interest of it, involving the capture of six officers and 
352 men of picked regiments, is the way in which we caught 
the enemy utterly by surprise and the rapid, easy way in 
which the whole operation was done. A touch which seems 
fantastic came at the end of the adventure when these young 
Germans, still breathless with amazement of their capture, 
were bundled into omnibuses which had been brought up 
near the lines to wait for them — the old London omnibuses 



~Mi 




o d ? 3 ■* s Miies 



which used to go "all the way to the Bank — Bank — Bank !" 
in the days before the world began to crack — and taken to 
their camp on our side of the battlefields. 

It was a grim, cold morning — piercingly cold, with a 
wind cutting Hke a knife across the snowfields. Not a 
morning when men might be expected to go out into the 
nakedness of No Man's Land. It was a morning when 
these German officers and men of the 119th and 121st Regi- 
ments, the Wiirtembergers of Konigin Olga, were glad to 



46 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

stay down in the warmth of their dug-outs, cooking coffee 
on the little stove with which each man of these favoured 
troops was provided, to the great envy of Bavarians on their 
right, who go on shorter rations and fewer comforts. They 
had some good dug-outs in and near the Sunken Road — 
which runs up from Morval to Le Transloy, and strikes 
through a little salient in front of our lines — till yesterday 
morning. The trenches on either side of the Sunken Road 
were not happy places for Wiirtembergers. For months 
past our guns had been pounding them so that they were 
mostly battered down, and only held here and there by lit- 
tle groups of men who dug themselves in. There was no 
wire in front of them, and here during the wet weather, 
and now during the great frost, the German troops (as we 
know from the prisoners to-day) suffered badly from 
trench-feet and stomach troubles, and in spite of their moral 
(they were all stout-hearted men) from what the French 
call the "cafard," and we call the "hump." 

Yesterday morning one or two shivering wretches stood 
sentry in the German line trying to gain shelter from the 
knife-blade of the wind. All others were below ground 
round the "fug" of their braziers. They believed the British 
over the way were just as quiet in the good work of keeping 
warm. That was their mistake. In our trenches the men 
were quiet, but busy, and above ground instead of below. 
They were waiting for a signal from the guns, and had their 
bayonets fixed and bombs slung about them, and iron ra- 
tions hung to their belts. A rum ration was served round, 
and the men drank it, and felt the glow of it, so that the 
white waste of No Man's Land did not look so cold and 
menacing. They were men of the Border Regiment and the 
Inniskillings of the 29th Division. Suddenly, at about half- 
past five, there was a terrific crash of guns, and at the same 
moment the men scrambled up into the open and with their 
bayonets low went out into No Man's Land, each man's 
footsteps making a trail in the snow. I think it took about 
four minutes, that passage of the lonely ground which was 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 47 

a hundred yards or so between the lines, all pock-marked 
with shell holes, and hard as iron after the freezing of the 
quagmire. There was no preliminary bombardment. As 
soon as the guns went off the men went, with the line of 
shells not far in front of them. They found no men above 
ground when they pierced the German line. It was curious 
and uncanny — the utter lifelessness of the place they came 
to capture. Good, too, for men attacking, for men who 
always listen for the quick rush of bullets, which is the 
ugliest sound in war. Not a single machine-gun spat at 
them. They knew quickly that they had surprised the 
enemy utterly. They found the dug-outs and called down 
the challenge and heard it answered. The Wiirtembergers 
came up dazed with the effect of the capture, hardly be- 
lieving it, as men in a dream. One of the officers ex- 
plained : "We thought it was just a morning strafe. We 
kept down in the dug-outs till it was over. We had no idea 
of an attack. How did you get here so quickly?" 

They were abashed. They said they would have put up a 
fight if they had had any kind of chance. But they were 
trapped. They could do nothing but surrender with the 
best grace possible. On the right, from two isolated bits of 
trench, there came a burst of rifle-fire. A few Germans 
there had time to recover from the stunning blow of the 
first surprise and fought pluckily till overpowered. The 
Borders and the Inniskillings went on farther than the ob- 
jective given to them, to a point 500 yards away from the 
German first line, and established themselves there. From 
neighbouring ground, through the white haze over the 
snowfields, red lights went up with the SOS signal, and 
presently the German gunners got busy. But the prisoners 
were bundled back to the omnibuses, and the men took pos- 
session of the dug-outs. Proper organization was difficult 
above ground. It was too hard to dig. From the farthest 
point, later in the day, the men were withdrawn to the 
ground given to them for their objectives and German at- 
tempts to organize counter-attacks were smashed by our 



48 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

artillery, because we have absolute observation of their 
movements from the higher ground won by great fighting 
in the Somme battles. To-day there was much gunning in 
all the neighbourhood of the fight, and the roar of guns 
rolled over the desolate fields of snow, the wide lonely waste 
which makes one's soul shiver to look at it as I stared at 
the scene of war, to-day and yesterday, in the teeth of the 
wind. 



3 

The Abandonment of Grandcourt 

February 8 
That the troops of our Naval Division (the 63rd) should 
have been able to walk into Grandcourt yesterday and take 
the place aft^r its abandonment by the enemy (except for a 
few men left behind to keep up appearances as long as pos- 
sible, p'oor wretches) is a proof that the German High Com- 
mand prefers, at this point of the struggle, to save casual- 
ties rather than to hold bad ground at any cost. It is a new 
phase, worthy of notice. A year ago he would not let his 
pride do this. Less than a year ago, when we took ground 
from him by a sudden assault, he would come back with a 
frightful counter-blow, and there would be a long and bloody 
struggle, as at the Bluff and St.-Eloi, over trenches taken 
and retaken. Combles was the first place from which he 
crept away without a fight. Grandcourt is the second place, 
abandoned for the same reason — because it was caught in 
the pincers of our forward movements. It lies low on the 
south side > of the Ancre, below Miraumont, and it became 
a place of misery to German troops after the capture of 
Beaucourt and Beaumont-Hamel, on the other side of the 
river — still worse when on Sunday last our men advanced 
north of Beaucourt, capturing a couple of hundred prisoners 
and consolidating on a line of ground dominating Grand- 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 49 

court, on the north-west. It was probably then that the 
enemy decided to withdraw to a stronger and higher posi- 
tion south of Miraumont and Pys, which he has been dig- 
ging and defending with rapid industry in spite of the hard 
frost, which doubles the labour of the spade. Fear, which 
is a great General, makes him a hard digger, and he will 
burrow underground while our men are scraping the snow 
away on our side of the line. A few men, as I have said, 
were left behind to make a show. They were seen moving 
about in the neighbourhood of a German trench barring the 
way to Grandcourt on the south-west. It was some time be- 
fore our patrols, creeping out over the snow, saw that this 
half-mile of line was empty of men, and that the enemy had 
gone back to some place unknown. On Tuesday our troops 
moved into this position, watched by those few men, left as 
scarecrows, who are now our prisoners, and who saw the 
English soldiers get up out of their ditches and shell-craters 
and cross the snowfield in open order with a steady trudge, 
their bayonets glittering, and then drop down into the bat- 
tered trench in which there was nothing but the litter of 
former habitation and some dead bodies. Yesterday it was 
decided to push on to Grandcourt. Observing officers could 
see the snow on the broken roofs and ruined walls of that 
village, where bits of brick and woodwork still stand after 
heavy bombardment. They could not see whether the place 
was still held. Only actual contact would show whether 
those quiet rooms would be noisy with the chatter of 
machine-gun fire if our men went in. A sinister spot — 
with an evil-sounding name to soldiers of the Somme, 
because here for many months the enemy had massed his 
guns which fired down to Contalmaison and flung high ex- 
plosives over the country below the Pozieres Ridge. 

It was in the afternoon that the entry was made beneath 
a great barrage of our shells advancing beyond the infantry 
and through a heavy fire from the enemy's guns, which 
did not check the advance of our men. A few German 
soldiers were taken in rear-guard posts. They came out 



50 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

of shell-craters with their hands up, and were sent back to 
our lines. There was no fighting in the ruins of the village. 
Grandcourt was ours, with its deep dug-outs littered with 
German clothes and stored with rations of German sol- 
diers, which our own men enjoyed as a change of diet, 
while they took cover from the enemy's shell-fire over his 
old home. 

Last night in the light of a full moon, curiously red so that 
the snow was faintly flushed, two more attacks were made 
and two more positions taken, north and south-east of 
Grandcourt. On the north side of the Ancre Baillescourt 
Farm was seized, and in its neighbourhood eighty soldiers 
and one officer were made prisoner. They belonged to the 
same corps as those I saw last Sunday, and were recruited 
from the Hamburg- Altona district; all stout fellows, well 
nourished and well clothed. They had not expected the 
attack, not so soon, anyhow, and were caught in dug-outs 
by the ruined farmhouse, which some months ago was a 
good landmark with its white walls and barns still stand- 
ing. Now it is but a litter of beams and broken plaster, 
like all houses along the line of battle. 



4 
The Gordons in the Butte de Warlencourt 

February 9 
The frost- lasts. Even in times of peace I suppose it would 
be remembered years hence because of its intensity of cold 
and continuance. Here on the Western Front it will be 
remembered by men who live, now very young, and then 
with hair as white as the snow which now lies in No Man's 
Land, because of its unforgettable pictures in sunlight and 
moonlight, its fantastic cruelties of coldness and discomfort, 
and its grim efifect upon the adventures of war when the 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 51 

patrols go out by night and British soldiers crawl across 
snow-filled shell-holes. 

There was a queer episode of Canadian history — only 
a few days old — which began when a sprightly young Da- 
dos (he's the fellow that gets all the chaff from the Divi- 
sional Follies) startled a respectable old lady behind the 
counter of a milliner's shop in a French village by demand- 
ing lOO ladies' "nighties" ("chemises de nuit" he called 
them) of the largest size. The village heard the story of 
this shopping expedition, listened to the old lady's shrill 
cackle of laughter, aaid wondered what joke was on among 
the Canadian troops. It was one of those jokes which be- 
long to the humours of this war, mixed with blood and 
death. Up in the Canadian trenches there were shouts of 
hoarse laughter, as over their khaki a hundred brawny 
young Canadians put on the night-dresses. They had been 
tied up with blue ribbon. The old moon, so watchful there 
in the steel-blue sky, had never looked down upon a stranger 
scene than these white-robed soldiers who went out into 
No Man's Land, with rifles and bombs. Some of the night- 
dresses, so clean and dainty as they had come out of the 
milliner's shop, were stained red before the end of the ad- 
venture. And Germans in their dug-outs caught a glimpse 
of these fantastic figures before death came quickly, or a 
shout of surrender. The Pierrots went back with some 
prisoners in the moonlight, and Canadian staff officers 
chuckled with laughter along telephone wires when the tale 
was told. 

Some of the prisoners who are taken do nothing but 
weep for the first few days after capture. "The prisoners 
are young," reports the Intelligence officer about the latest 
batch, "and have wept copiously since their capture." The 
men I have seen myself during the past few days had a 
look of misery in their eyes. They hate these midnight 
raids of ours, coming suddenly upon them night after 
night through the white glimmer of the snowfields. They 
have taken dogs into the trenches now to give a quicker 



52 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and surer warning than young sentries, who are afraid to 
cry out when they see white figures moving, because they 
think they see them always, when shadows stir in the moon- 
light across the snow. Our men during recent nights have 
heard these dogs giving short, sharp barks. One of them 
came out into No Man's Land and sniffed about some black 
things lying quiet under the cover of snow. No alarm was 
given when some friends of mine went out to make an at- 
tack some nights ago, and it was lucky for them, for if they 
had been discovered too soon all their plans would have 
been spoilt, and white smocks would not have saved them. 
They were the 8/ioth Gordons of the 15th Division. 
Some of my readers will remember the crowd, for I have 
described my meetings with them up and down the roads of 
war. It is they who arranged the details of the night's 
adventure, and because it is typical of the things that happen 
— of the Terror that comes in the night — it is worth tell- 
ing. The Highlanders, when they took up their attacking 
line, were dressed in white smocks covering their kilts, and 
in steel helmets painted white. Their black arms and feet 
were like the smudges on the snow. They lay very quiet, 
visible on the left, from the Butte de Warlencourt, that 
old high mound in the Somme battlefields which was once 
the burial-place of a prehistoric man and is now the tomb 
of young soldiers in the Durham Light Infantry who fought 
and died there. The moon was bright on the snow about 
them, but a misty vapour was on the ground. Each man 
had been warned not to cough or sneeze. Their rifles were 
loaded, and with bayonets fixed, so that there should be no 
rattle of arms or clicks of bolts. They were in two parties, 
and their orders were to overthrow the advanced German 
posts which were known to be in front of the Butte, and 
to form a ring of posts round the position attacked while 
its dug-outs were being dealt with. A heavy barrage was 
fired suddenly up and down the German lines, so as to be- 
wilder the enemy as to the point of attack, and the Gordons 
in their white smocks rose up and advanced. Two shots 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 53 

rang out from one of the German posts. No more than 
that. The two waves of men went on. Those on the right 
flank had trouble in crossing the ground. Several of them 
fell into deep shell-craters frozen hard. A machine-gun 
was fired on the left, but was then silenced by our shell- 
fire. The men inclined a little to the left, and came round 
on the west side of the position, where there was a small 
quarry. On their way they surprised an enemy post and 
took six prisoners. 

A little way farther on they came across a trench-mortar, 
a dug-out, and two terror-stricken men. An officer put a 
Stokes bomb down the mortar and blew it up. The men 
were taken, and the dug-out was destroyed. Then the Gor- 
dons went on to the Butte de Warlencourt. Underneath 
it were the dug-outs of a German company, snow-capped 
and hidden. The Scots went round like wolves hunting 
for the way down. There were four ways down, and three 
of them were found low down about four yards apart. Men 
were talking down there excitedly. Their German speech 
was loud and there was the note of terror in it. 

"Come out!" shouted the Gordons several times; but at 
one entrance only one man came out, and at another only 
one, and at the third twelve men, who were taken prisoners. 
The others would not surrender. Some bombs and a Stokes 
shell were thrown down the doorways, and suddenly this 
nest of dug-outs was seen to collapse, and black smoke 
came up from the pit, melting the edges of the snow. Down 
below the voices went on, rising to high cries of terror. 
Then flames appeared, shedding a red glare over No Man's 
Land. 

On the left the Gordons had been held up by machine- 
gun fire and rifle-fire, which came across to them from a 
trench to which they were advancing. At the west side 
of the trench, in a wired enclosure, the machine-gun was 
troublesome. Some of the white smocks fell. An attempt 
was made to rush it, but failed. Afterwards the gun and 
the team were knocked out by a shell. A group of Germans 



54 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

came out of the trench and started bombing, until a Stokes 
bomb scattered them. Then the Gordons went down and 
brought out some prisoners, and blew up a dug-out. 

It was time to go back, for the German barrage had 
begun; but the Gordons were able to get home without 
many casualties. Nearly two hours afterwards a loud ex- 
plosion was heard across the way, as though a bomb store 
had blown up. The sky was red over there by the flare of 
a fire. ... In the dug-outs of the Butte de Warlencourt a 
whole company of Germans was being burnt alive. 



5 
The Battle of Boom Ravine 

February 15 
On the ws.y to Miraumont there was a deep gully called 
Boom Ravine, and here on February 17 there was fierce 
fighting by the Royal Fusiliers, the Northamptons, and the 
Middlesex men of the 29th Division. 

In difficulty, in grim human courage, in all its drama of 
fog, and darkness, and shell-fire, and death, it seems to me 
to hold most of what this war means to individual men — 
all that can be asked of them in such hours. 

The thaw had just set in and the ground was soppy, which 
was bad luck. In spite of the thaw, it was horribly, damply 
cold, but the men had been given a good meal before form- 
ing up for- the attack, and officers brought up the rum ra- 
tion in bottles, so that the men could attack with some 
warmth in them. In the utter darkness, unable to make any 
glimmer of light lest the enemy should see, the brigades 
tried to get into line. Two companies lost themselves, and 
were lost, but got into touch again in time. It was all 
black and beastly. A great fire of high explosives burst 
over our assembly lines. The darkness was lit up by the 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 55 

red flashes of these bursting shells. Men fell, wounded and 
dead. The Royal Fusiliers were specially tried, and their 
brigadier wondered whether they would have the spirit to 
get up and attack when the hour arrived. But when the 
moment came the survivors rose and went forward, and 
fought through to the last goal. They were the first to 
get to Grandcourt Trench, which lay between them and 
the Boom Ravine. The wire was not cut, and there was 
a hammering of machine-guns and the swish of machine- 
gun bullets. This battalion had already lost all its officers, 
who had gone forward gallantly, leading their men and 
meeting the bullets first. A sergeant-major took command, 
shouted to his men to keep steady, and found a gap through 
the wire. They forced their way through, passed Grand- 
court Trench, and, with other men, dropped into Boom 
Ravine. 

That place is a sunken road, almost parallel with Grand- 
court Trench, and with South Miraumont Trench beyond. 
Before war came — even last summer, indeed — it was like a 
Devonshire lane, with steep shelving banks, thirty to forty 
feet high, and trees growing on either side, with overhang- 
ing roots. It was not like a Devonshire lane when our 
men scrambled and fell down its banks. It was a ravine 
of death. Our shell-fire had smashed down all the trees, 
and their tall trunks lay at the bottom of the gulley, and 
their branches were flung about. The banks had been 
opened out by shell-craters, and several of the German dug- 
outs built into the sides of them were upheaved or choked. 
Dead bodies or human fragments lay among the branches 
and broken woodwork. A shell of ours had entered one 
dug-out and blown six dead men out of its doorway. They 
sprawled there at the entrance. Inside were six other dead. 
From dug-outs not blown up or choked came groups of 
German soldiers, pallid and nerve-broken, who gave them- 
selves up quickly enough. One man was talkative. He said 
in perfect English that he had been coachman to an Eng- 
lish earl, and he cursed our artillery, and said that if he 



56 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

could get at our blinking gunners he would wring their 
blighted necks — or words to that effect. 

But the battle was not over yet. While Boom Ravine 
was being cleared of its living inhabitants by the Royal 
Fusiliers other waves were coming up ; or, rather, not waves, 
but odd groups of men, dodging over the shell-craters, and 
hunting as they went for German snipers, who lay in their 
holes firing until they were pinned by bayonet-points. Their 
bodies lie there now, curled up. Some of them pretended 
to be dead when our men came near. One of them lay 
still, with his face in the moist earth. "See that that man 
is properly dead," said an officer, and a soldier with him 
pricked the man. He sprang up with a scream and ran hard 
away — to our lines. Six prisoners came trudging back 
from the Ravine, with a slightly wounded man as an escort. 
On the way back they found themselves very lonely with 
him, and passed some rifles lying in their way. They seized 
the rifles and became fighting men again, until a little Welsh 
officer of the South Wales Borderers met them, and killed 
every one of them with a revolver. 



The Enemy Withdraws 

February i8 
The enemy is steadily withdrawing his troops from many 
positions between Hebuterne and the ground south-west of 
Bapaume, and our patrols are pushing forward into aban- 
doned country, which they have penetrated in some places 
for nearly three miles beyond our former line. They are 
already north-west of Serre, south of Irles, above Mirau- 
mont, Petit-Mi raumont and Pys, which are now in our 
hands without a battle. We have gained a number of Ger- 
man strongholds which we expected to win only by heavy 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 57 

fighting, and the enemy has yielded to our pressure, the 
ceaseless pressure of men and guns, by escaping to a new 
line of defence along the Bapaume Ridge. This is the 
most notable movement which has taken place in the war 
since the autumn of the first year. The German retire- 
ment in the battle of the Marne was forced upon them 
only by actual defeat on the ground. This is a strategical 
retreat, revealing a new phase of weakness in their de- 
fensive conditions. It has not come to our Generals as 
a surprise. After the battle of Boom Ravine, there were 
several signs that the enemy contemplated a withdrawal 
from the two Miraumonts, and our recent capture of Bailies- 
court Farm and the ground on the north of the Ancre seri- 
ously menaced Serre. Yesterday morning, through a heavy 
grey mist, fires were seen burning along the German front 
line. For several days the enemy's field-batteries had been 
firing an abnormal amount of ammunition, and it seemed 
likely that they were getting rid of their supplies in the 
forward dumps before withdrawing their guns. Patrols 
sent out had a queer, imcanny experience. It was very quiet 
in the mist, almost alarmingly quiet. They pushed in after 
the enemy. Not a sound, not a shot came from Serre. . . . 
These reports were sent back, and more patrols were sent 
forward in various directions. They pushed on, picking up 
a few prisoners here and there who were sniping from shell- 
holes and serving solitary machine-guns. These men con- 
fessed that they had been left behind with orders to keep 
firing and to make a show so that we might believe the 
ground was still strongly held. Farther on the right the 
same thing was happening. Patrols went out and sent back 
messages saying that no enemy was ahead. They went into 
Miraumont, and in the centre of the main road a mine blew 
up with a loud explosion; but by great good luck none of 
our men were hurt. At the end of the street six Germans 
were seen among the ruins. They were fired at and dis- 
appeared. Miraumont was taken without another shot than 
this, and with it Little Miraumont, next door. 



58 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Last night our troops advanced towards Warlencourt and 
south of Irles, and they took possession of the famous 
Butte, that high mound above the bones of some prehistoric 
man, for which there had been so much bloody fighting 
in the autumn and the first month of this year. From the 
direction of Bapaume the noise of heavy explosions was 
heard, as though ammunition dumps were being blown up, 
and for the first time perhaps since the German retreat from 
the Mame the enemy was destroying his own material of 
war on his way back. 



7 

Our Entry into Gommecourt \ 

February 28 
Last night the German troops abandoned Gommecourt and 
Pusieux and our men followed the first patrols, who had 
felt forward and took possession of the salient which keeps 
to the line of the park surrounding the famous old chateau. 
This entry into Gommecourt without a fight was most 
sensational. It was here on July i of 1916 that waves of 
London men of the 56th Division assaulted an almost im- 
pregnable position, and by the highest valour and sacrifice 
broke and held its lines until forced back by massed gun- 
fire which threatened them with annihilation. Many of our 
dead lay there, and the place will be hatmted for ever by 
the memory of their loss and great endurance. At last the 
gates were open. The enemy's troops had stolen away in 
the dusk, leaving nothing behind but the refuse of trench 
life and the litter of trench tools. In order to keep the 
way open for their withdrawal, strong posts of Germans 
with machine-guns held out in a wedge just south of 
Rossignol Wood and in Biez Wood, which is west of 
Bucquoy. These rear-guard posts, numbering an officer 
or two and anything between thirty to sixty men with ma- 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 59 

chine-guns, and telephones keeping them in touch with the 
main army, were chosen for their tried courage and intel- 
ligence, and stayed behind with orders to hold on to the 
last possible moment 

All the tricks of war are being used to check and kill 
our patrols. In addition to trip-wires attached to explo- 
sives, German helmets have bee^i left about with bombs con- 
cealed in them so as to explode on being touched, and there 
are other devices of this kind which are ingenious and 
devilish. The enemy's snipers and machine-gunners give 
our men greater trouble, but are being routed out from 
their hiding-places. There were a lot of them in the ruins 
of Pusieux, but last night, after sharp fighting and a grim 
man-hunt among the broken brickwork, the enemy was de- 
stroyed in this village, and our line now runs well beyond 
it to Gommecourt, on the left and down to Irles on the 
right. The enemy has destroyed Irles church tower, as he 
has destroyed the church of Achiet-le-Petit, and the famous 
clock tower of Bapaume, on which we tried to read the 
time from the high ground westward during the battles of 
the Somme. This is to get rid of observation which might 
be useful to us in our advance. 

Heavy shell-fire has been concentrated by enemy batteries 
on the village of Irles, and he is also barraging with high 
explosives upon Serre, Miraumont, Grandcourt, and other 
places from which he has withdrawn. It is probable that 
he is using up his reserves of ammunition in the dumps 
along the line of his retirement. Many of his heavy guns 
still remain on railway mountings behind Bapaume — we are 
now less than a mile from that town — and they are doing 
double duty by quick firing. The latest village to fall into 
our hands is Thilloy, north of Ligny-Thilloy, and just south 
of Bapaume, and the enemy is now retiring to Loupart 
Wood, Achiet-le-Petit, and Bucquoy, strongly defended for 
the time being by a thick belt of wire. 

It is enormously interesting to speculate upon this new 
plan of the German High Command. It is a plan forced 



60 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

upon hinj by steady pressure of our attacks, which thrust 
him into bad ground, where the condition of his troops 
was hideous, but, beyond all, by the fear that our fighting 
power in the spring might break his armies if they stayed 
on their old line. Now he is executing with skill, aided by 
great luck — for the foggy weather is his luck — a manoeu- 
vre designed to shorten his line, thereby increasing his 
offensive and defensive man-power, and to withdraw in 
the way that he intends to make it difficult for pursuit, and 
so to gain time to fall back upon new and stronger lines 
of defence. 

T^ ^ *J* ^ 

It is difficult to describe the feelings of our men who go 
forward to these villages and capture them, and settle down 
in them for a day or two, unless you have gazed at those 
places for months through narrow slits in undergroimd 
chambers, and know that it would be easier to go from life 
to eternity than cross over the enemy's wire into those 
strongholds while they are inhabited by men with machine- 
guns. 

You cannot imagine the thrill of walking one day into 
Gommecourt, or Miraumont, or Irles, without resistance, 
and seeing in close detail the way of life led by the men 
who have* been doing their best to kill you. There is some- 
thing uncanny in handling the things they handled, in sit- 
ting at the tables where they took their meals, in walking 
about the ruins which our guns made above them. I had 
this thrill when I walked through Gommecourt — Gomme- 
court the terrible, and the graveyard of so many brave 
London boys who fell here on July i — and up through 
Gommecourt Park, with its rows of riven trees, to a point 
beyond, and to a far outpost where a group of soldiers 
attached to the Sherwood Foresters of the 46th Division, 
full of spirit and gaiety, in spite of the deadly menace 
about them, had dragged up a heavy trench-mortar and its 
monstrous winged shells, which they were firing into a 
copse 500 yards away where Fritz was holding out. So 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 61 

through the snow I went into Gommecourt down a road 
pitted with recent shell-holes, and with a young Sherwood 
Forester who said, ''It's best to be quick along this track. 
It ain't a health resort." 

It was not a pretty place at all, and there were nasty 
noises about it, as shells went singing overhead, but there 
was a sinister sense of romance, a look of white and naked 
tragedy in snow-covered Gommecourt. Our guns had 
played hell with the place, though we could not capture it 
on July I. Thousands of shells, even millions, had flung 
it into ruin — the famous chateau, the church, the great 
barns, the school-house, and all the buildings here. Not a 
tree in what had once been a noble park remained unmuti- 
lated. On the day before the Germans left a Stokes mortar 
battery of ours fired iioo shells into Gommecourt in a quar- 
ter of an hour. 

"No wonder old Fritz left in a hurry," said the young 
officer who had achieved this record. He chuckled at the 
thought of it, and as he went through Gommecourt with 
me pointed out with pride the "top-hole" effect of all our 
gun-fire. To him, as a gunner, all this destruction was a 
good sight. He stopped in front of a hole big enough to 
bury a country cottage, and said, "That was done by old 
Charley's 9.45 trench-mortar. Some hole, what?" 

"Looks as if some German officer had had to walk home," 
said the trench-mortar officer, who was a humorous fellow, 
as he glanced at a shattered motor-car. 

So many of the young officers of ours are humorous fel- 
lows, and I am bound to say that I never met a merrier 
party than a little lot I found at a spot called Pigeon Wood, 
far beyond Gommecourt, where the enemy flings shells most 
of the day and night, so that it is a litter of broken twigs 
and branches. 

A sergeant-major took me up there and introduced me 
to his officers. 

"This is the real Street of Adventure," he said, "though 
it's a long way from Fleet Street" — which I thought was 



62 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

pretty good for a sergeant-major met in a casual way on 
a field of battle. It appeared that there was to be a trench- 
mortar "stunt" in half an hour or so, and he wanted me 
to see "the fun." Through the driving snow we went into 
the bit of wood, trampling over the broken twigs and step- 
ping aside from shell-holes, and because of the nasty noises 
about — I hear no music in the song of the shell — I was glad 
when the sergeant-major went down the entrance of a dug- 
out and called out for the officer. 

It was one of the deep German dug-outs thirty or forty 
feet down, and very dark on the way. In the room below, 
nicely panelled, were the merry grigs I had come to meet, 
and in less than a minute they had made me welcome, and 
in less than five I was sitting on a German chair at a Ger- 
man table, drinking German soda-water out of German 
glasses, with a party of English boys 500 yards from the 
German outposts over the way. 

They told me how they had brought their trench-mortar 
up. It was an absolute record, and they were as proud and 
pleased as schoolboys who have won a game. They roared 
with laughter at the story of the senior officer chased by 
two Boches, and roared again when the captain sent round 
to the "chemist's shop" next door for some more soda- 
water and a bottle of whisky. They had found thousands 
of bottles of soda-water, and thousands of bombs and other 
things left behind in a hurry, including a complete change 
of woman's clothing, now being worn by one of our Tom- 
mies badly in need of clean linen. 

"This.dug-out is all right," said one of the younger offi- 
cers, "but you come and see mine. It's absolutely priceless." 

It was one of the best specimens of German architecture 
I have ever seen on a battlefield. It was not only panelled 
but papered. It was furnished elegantly with a washhand- 
stand and a gilded mirror and German coloured prints — ■ 
and not all our shells could touch it, because of its depth 
below the ground. ... I saw the trench-mortar "stunt," 
which flung up volcanoes in the German ground by Kite 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 63 

Copse, and stood out in the snow with a party of men who 
had nothing between them and the enemy but a narro^, 
stretch of shell-broken earth, and went away from the wood 
just as the enemy began shelling it again, and sat down 
under the bank with one of the officers when the enemy 
"bracketed" the road back with whiz-bangs, and stopped 
on the way to take a cup of tea in another dug-out, and to 
make friends with other men who were following up the 
enemy, and moving into German apartments for a night or 
so, before they go farther on, with that keen and spirited 
courage which is the only good thing in this war. They 
are mostly boys — I am a Rip Van Winkle to them — and 
with the heart of boyhood they take deadly risks lightly 
and make a good joke of a bad business, and are very 
frightened sometimes and make a joke of that, and are 
great soldiers though they were never meant for the trade. 
The enemy is falling back still, but these boys of ours are 
catching him up, and are quick in pursuit, in spite of the 
foul ground and the foul weather and the barrage of his 
guns. 



8 

Why the Enemy Withdrew 

March 3 
The weather is still favourable to the enemy in his plan of 
withdrawal. Yesterday there was over all the battlefields 
such a solid fog, after a night of frost which condensed the 
earth's moisture, that one could not see fifty yards ahead. 
Our airmen, if they had thought it worth while mounting, 
would have stared down into this white mist and seen noth- 
ing else. Our gunners had to fire "off the map" at a time 
when direct observation would have been most valuable. 
I do not remember to have seen anything so uncanny on 
this front as the effect of our men moving in this heavy 



64 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

wet darkness like legions of shadows looming up in a grey- 
way, and then blotted out. The fog clung to them, dripped 
from the rims of their steel helmets, made their breath like 
steam. The shaggy coats of horses and mules plastered 
witk heavy streaks of mud were all damp with little beads 
of moisture as white as hoar-frost. 

Nothing so far in this German movement has been sensa- 
tional except the fact itself. Fantastic stories about gas- 
shells, battles, and great slaughter in the capture of the 
enemy's positions are merely conjured up by people who 
know nothing of the truth. 

The truth is simple and stark. The enemy decided to 
withdraw, and made his plans to withdraw with careful 
thought for detail in order to frustrate any preparations 
we might have made to deal him the famous knock-out 
blow and in order to save his man-power, not only by escap- 
ing this great slaughter which was drawing near upon him 
as the weeks passed, but by shortening his line and so lib- 
erating a number of divisions for offensive and defensive 
purposes. He timed this strategical withdrawal well. He 
made use of the hard frost for the movement of men and 
guns and material, and withdrew the last men from his 
strongholds on the old line just as the thaw set in, so that 
the ground lapsed into quagmire more fearful than before 
the days of the long frost, and pursuit for our men and 
our guns and our material was doubly difficult He de- 
stroyed what he could not take away, and left very little 
behind. He fired many of his dug-outs, and left only a few 
snipers and a few machine-gunners in shell-holes and strong 
posts to hold up our patrols while the next body of rear- 
guard outposts fell back behind the barbed wire in front 
of the series of diagonal trench lines which defend the way 
to Bapaume. In Gommecourt our troops found only one 
living man, and he was half dead and quite blind. He had 
been wounded twenty-four hours previously by a bomb 
from one of our scouts and had crawled back into a dug- 
out. It is astounding, but, I believe, quite true, that he knew, 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 66 

nothing about the abandonment of Gommecourt, even when 
it had been achieved. He would not beheve it when our 
men told him. He had lain in his earth-hole wondering at 
the silence, believing himself deaf as well as blind, except 
that he could hear the crash of shells. He was frightened 
because he could hear no movement of his fellow-soldiers. 
The German scheme is undoubtedly to delay our advance 
as much as possible and at the cheapest price to himself, 
so that much time may have elapsed (while his submarines 
are still at work, and his diplomats, and his propaganda) 
before we come up to him with all our weight of men and 
metal upon the real lines to which he is falling back. By 
belts of barbed wire between the lines of retirement, down 
past Loupart Wood, and then past Grevillers and Achiet, 
and outside Bapaume, as well as by strong bodies of picked 
troops holding on to these positions until the last moment 
before death or capture or escape, and by massing guns 
eastward of Bapaume in order to impede our pursuit by 
long-range fire from his "heavies," and to hold the pivot 
while his troops swing back in this slow and gradual way, 
he hopes to make things easy for himself and damnably 
difficult for us. 

* * * :|! 

March 12 
Loupart Wood, a high belt of trees, thick and black 
against the sky, is the storm-centre of the battle line on this 
part of the front. Our guns were busy with it, flinging 
shells into its network of naked branches. The shell-bursts 
were white against its blackness, and the chalky soil in front 
of it was tossed up in spraying fountains. From the ene- 
my's side high explosives were dropping over Miraumont, 
and Irles was being heavily bombed. It was like a day in 
the first battles of the Somme, and brought back to me old 
memories of frightfulness. Behind me were the Somme 
battlefields, one vast landscape of the abomination of deso- 
lation strewn still with the litter of great conflict, with 
thousands of unexploded shells lying squat in mud, and 



66 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

hideously tormented out of all semblance of earth's sweet 
beauty by millions of shell-holes and the yawning chasms of 
mine-craters, and the chaos of innumerable trenches dug 
deep and then smashed by the fury of heavy guns. That 
is an old picture which I have described, or failed to de- 
scribe, a score of times when over this mangled earth, yard 
by yard, from one ruin to another, from one copse of broken 
woodland to another group of black gallows which were 
trees, our men went figliting, so that here is the graveyard 
of gallant youth, and the Field of Honour which is sacred 
to the soul of our race. It was the old picture, but into 
it came to-day as yesterday new men of ours who are car- 
rying on the tale to whatever ending it may have. They 
came through mud and in mud and with mud. The heavy 
horses of the gunners and transport men were all whitened 
with wet chalk to the ears. Mules were ridiculous, like 
amphibious creatures who had come up out of the slime to 
stare with wicked eyes at what men are doing with the 
earth's surface. Eight-inch guns were wallowing in bogs 
from which their shiny snouts thrust up, belching forth 
flame. Over the wide, white, barren stretch of hell which 
we call the battlefield their monstrous shells went howling 
after the full-throated roars which clouted one's ear-drums 
like blows from a hammer. And between the guns, and 
in front of the guns, and past the guns went our march- 
ing men, our mud men, with wet steel helmets, with gobs of 
mud on their faces, with clods of mud growing monstrously 
upon their boots at every step. 

A grim old war, fantastic in its contrasts and in its 
stage properties! Once when I heard the chimes of mid- 
night in Covent Garden and stood drinking at a coffee-stall 
by Paul's Church I never guessed I should find such a place 
of wayside refreshment, such a house on wheels, in the mid- 
dle of Armageddon. But there it was to-day, a coffee-stall 
bang in the middle of the battlefield, and there, asking for 
a "mug o' thick," stood a crowd of English soldiers, worse 
scarecrows than the night birds of the London slums and 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 67 

more in need of warmth for body and soul. Not far away, 

well under shell-fire, was a London omnibus, and as a mate 

in evil days, a Tank. 

The rain came down in a thick drizzle. Loupart Wood 

disappeared like a ghost picture. Irles was blotted out. 

Our eight-inch shells went howling out of a cotton-wool 

mist. Our men went marching with their steel hats down 

against the beat of the rain. It was a wintry scene again — 

but on the moist air there was a faint scent not of winter — 

a smell of wet earth sweeter than the ac^id stench of the 

battlefields. It was the breath of spring coming with its 

promise of life. And with its promise of death. 
* * * * 

The enemy is still holding out in Achiet-le-Petit and 
Bucquoy, though I believe his residence there is not for 
long. From what I saw to-day watching our bombardment 
of the line to which he has retreated, it seems certain that 
he will be compelled to leave in a hurry, just as he left, 
Loupart Wood the night before last. 

As I went over the battlefields to-day it was made visible 
to me that the enemy has suffered most devilish torments 
in the ground from which he is now retreating. All north 
of Courcelette, up by Miraumont and Pys, and below Lou- 
part Wood, this wild chaos — all so upturned by shell-fire 
that one's gorge rises at the sight of such obscene mangling 
of our mother earth — is strewn with bodies of dead Ger- 
man soldiers. They lie grey wet lumps of death over a 
great stretch of ground, many of them half buried by their 
comrades or by high explosives. Most of them are stark 
above the soil with their eye-sockets to the sky. I stood 
to-day in a ravine to which the Regina Trench leads be- 
tween Pys and Miraumont, and not any morbid vision of 
an absinthe-maddened dream of hell could be more fearful 
than what I stared at standing there, with the rain beating 
on me across the battlefield, and the roar of guns on every 
side, and the long rushing whistles of heavy shells in flight 
over Loupart Wood. The place was a shambles of German 



68 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

troops. They had had machine-gun emplacements here, 
and deep dug-outs under cover of earth-banks. But our 
guns had found them out and poured fire upon them. All 
this garrison had been killed and cut to pieces before or 
after death. Their bodies or their fragments lay in every 
shape and shapelessness of death, in puddles of broken 
trenches or on the edge of deep ponds in shell-craters. The 
water was vivid green about them, or red as blood, with the 
colour of high-explosive gases. Mask-like faces, with holes 
for eyes, seemed to stare back at me as I stared at them, 
not with any curiosity in this sight of death — for it is not 
new to me — but counting their numbers and reckoning the 
sum of all these things who a little time ago were living men. 
Some of our dead lay among them, but out of 850 lying 
hereabouts, 700 were German soldiers. 

Our gun-fire, continued to-day as yesterday, leaves noth- 
ing alive or whole when it is concentrated on a place like 
this, deliberate in smashing it. Here it had flung up ma- 
chine-gun emplacements and made rubbish-heaps of their 
casemates and guns. It had broken hundreds of rifles into 
matchwood, and flung up the kit of men from deep dug- 
outs, littering earth with their pouches and helmets and 
bits of clothing. Where I stood was only one patch of 
ground on a wide battlefield. It is all like that, though else- 
where the dead are not so thickly clustered. For miles it is 
all pitted with ten- feet craters intermingling and leaving 
not a yard of earth untouched. It is one great obscenity, 
killing for all time the legend of war's glory and romance. 
Over it to-day went a brave man on his mission. He was 
not a soldier, though he had a steel hat on his head and a 
khaki uniform. He was a padre who, with a fellow-officer 
and a few men, is following up the fighting men, burying 
those who fall, our own and the enemy's. He collects their 
identity discs and marks their graves. For weeks he has 
done this, and, though he is sickened, he goes on with a 
grim zeal, searching out the new dead, directing the dig- 
ging of new graves, covering up Germans who lie so thick. 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 69 

He waved his hand to me as he went up to Loupart Wood, 
and I saluted him as a man of fine enthusiasm and good 
courage in the abomination of desolation which is our 
battle-ground. 

The secret of the German retreat is here on this ground. 
To save themselves from another such shambles they are 
falling back to new lines, where they hope to be safer from 
our massed artillery. But as I saw to-day our gun-fire is 
following them closely and forcing them back at a harder 
pace, and killing them as they go. The horror of war is 
still close at their heels, and will never end till the war ends, 
though that may be long, O Lord ! from now. 



9 

The Australians Enter Bapaume 

March 17 
To-day quite early in the morning our Australian troops 
entered Bapaume. Achiet-le-Petit and Biefvillers also fell 
into our hands and the enemy is in retreat across the plains 
below the Bapaume Ridge. 

I had the honour of going into Bapaume myself this 
morning, and the luck to come out again, and now, sitting 
down to tell the history of this day — one of the great days 
in this war — I feel something of the old thrill that came 
to all of us when the enemy fell back from the Mame and 
retreated to the Aisne. 

Bapaume is ours after a short, sharp fight with its last 
rear-guard post. I don't know how much this will mean 
to people at home, to whom the town is just a name, fa- 
miliar only because of its repetition in dispatches. To us 
out here it means enormous things — above all, the comple- 
tion or result of a great series of battles, in which many of 
our best gave their lives so that our troops could attain 



70 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the ridge across which they went to-day, and hold the town 
which is the gateway to the plains beyond. For this the 
Canadians fought through Courcelette, where many of their 
poor bodies lie even now in the broken ground. For this 
the Australians struggled with most grim heroism on the 
high plateau of Pozieres, which bears upon every yard of 
its soil the signs of the most frightful strife that man- 
kind has known in all the history of warfare. For an- 
other stage on the road to Bapaume London regiments went 
up to Eaucourt-l'Abbaye, and the Gordons stormed the 
white mound of the Butte de Warlencourt. For the cap- 
ture of Bapaume our patrols with machine-guns and trench- 
mortars, and our gunners with their batteries, have pushed 
on through the day and night during recent weeks, gaining 
La Barque and Ligny and Thilloy, not sleeping night after 
night, not resting, so that beards have grown on young 
chins, and the eyes of these men look glazed and dead 
except for the fire that lights up in them when there is 
another bit of work to do. For this, thousands of British 
soldiers have laboured like ants — it is all like a monstrous 
ant-heap in commotion — carrying up material of war, build- 
ing roads over quagmires, laying down railroads under 
shell-fiire, plugging up shell-craters with bricks and stone 
so that the horse transport can follow, and the guns get 
forward and the way be made smooth for the fall of 
Bapaume. ... So Bapaume is ours. Years ago, and 
months ago, and weeks ago, I have travelled the road to- 
wards Bapaume from Amiens to Albert, from that city of 
the Falling Virgin, past the vast mine-crater of La Boisselle 
up to Pozieres and beyond, and always I and comrades 
of mine have glanced sideways and smiled grimly at the 
milestones which said so many kilometres to Bapaume-r-and 
yet a world of strife to go. Now those stones will not stare 
up at us with irony. There is no longer a point on the 
road where one has to halt lest one should die. To-day 
I walked past the milestones — ten, seven, four, three, one — 
and then into Bapaume, and did not die, though to tell the 



(Rfbemont/ 



• t Nesle 



Ja^JL/Si Simon 



•t \ Cuiscard 

J ^ 

Chauni/c 
Lassignu ^^^=^?-^^^\ 1 



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Cbmpiegne 



/jKers 



60ISS0NS 



Line on July 1, 1916 90 • • • 

« " March 1, 1917 amMMMMM 
" « iforc/i 18, 1917 



72 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

truth death missed me only by a yard or two. I have had 
many strange and memorable walks in war, but none more 
wonderful than this, for really it was a strange way this 
road to Bapaume, with all the tragedy and all the courage 
of this warfare, and all the ugly spirit of it on every side. 
I walked through the highway of our greatest battles up 
from Pozieres, past Courcelette, with Martinpuich to the 
right, past the ruins of Destremont Farm, and into the ruins 
of Le Sars. Thence the road struck straight towards 
Bapaume, with the grey pyramid of the Butte de Warlen- 
court on one side and the frightful turmoil of Warlencourt 
village on the other. I did not walk alone along this way 
through the litter of many battles, through its muck and 
stench and corruption under a fair blue sky, with wisps 
of white cloud above and the glitter of spring sunshine over 
all the white leprous landscape of these fields. Australian 
soldiers were going the same way — towards Bapaume. 
Some of them wore sprigs of shamrock in their buttonholes, 
and I remembered it was St. Patrick's Day. Some of them 
were gunners, and some were pioneers, and some were Gen- 
erals and high officers, and they had the look of victory 
upon them and were talking cheerily about the great news 
of the day. It was in the neighbourhood of a haunted- 
looking place called "La Coupe-gueule," which means Cut- 
throat, once I imagine a farmstead or estaminet, that the 
road became the scene of very recent warfare — a few hours 
old or a few minutes. One is very quick to read how old 
the signs are by the look of the earth, by smells and sounds, 
by little, sure, alarming signs. Dead horses lay about — 
newly dead. Shell-craters with clean sides pock-marked 
the earth ten feet deep. Aeroplanes had crashed down, one 
of them a few minutes ago. A car came along and I saw 
a young pilot lying back wounded, with another officer 
smoking a cigarette, grave-eyed and pallid. Pools of red 
mud were on either side of the road, or in the middle of it. 
Everywhere in neighbouring ground hidden batteries were 
firing ceaselessly, the long sixty-pounders making sharp 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 73 

reports that stunned one's ears, the field-guns firing rapidly 
with sharp knocks. Up in the blue sky there was other 
gunning. Flights of our aeroplanes were up singing with 
a loud, deep, humming music as of monstrous bees. Our 
"Archies" were strafing a German plane, venturesome over 
our country. High up in the blue was the rattle of machine- 
gun fire. Down from Bapaume came a procession of 
stretcher-bearers with wounded comrades shoulder high, 
borne like heroes, slowly and with unconscious dignity, 
by these tall men in steel helmets. The enemy had ruined 
the road in several places with enormous craters, to stop 
our progress. They were twenty yards across, and very 
deep, and fearful pitfalls in the dark. Past the ruins of 
La Barque, past the ruins of Ligny-Thilloy and Thilloy, 
went the road to Bapaume. Behind me now on the left was 
Loupart Wood, the storm-centre of strife when I went up 
to it a few days ago, and Grevillers beside it, smashed to 
death, and then presently and quite suddenly I came into 
sight of Bapaume. It was only a few hundred yards away, 
and I could see every detail of its streets and houses. A 
street along the Bapaume road went straight into the town, 
and then went sharply at right angles, so that all the length 
of Bapaume lay in front of me. The sun was upon it, 
shining very bright and clear upon its houses. It was a 
sun-picture of destruction. Bapaume was still standing, 
but broken and burnt. 

In the middle of Bapaume stood the remnant of the old 
clock-tower, a tower of brown brick, like the houses about 
it, but broken off at the top, only two-thirds of its former 
height, and without the clock which used to tell us the time 
miles away when we gazed through telescopes from distant 
observation-posts, when we still had miles to go on the 
way to Bapaume. On the right of the old tower the town 
was burning, not in flames when I entered, but with volumes 
of white smoke issuing slowly from a row of red villas 
already gutted by fires lighted before the Germans left. 

A Colonel came riding out of Bapaume, He was carry- 



74 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ing a big German beer-jug, and showed me his trophy, lean- 
ing down over his saddle to let me read the words : 

Zum Feldgrauen Hilfe 

"Is it pretty easy to get into Bapaume ?" I asked. 

"Barring the heavy stuff," he said. "They're putting 
over shells at the rate of two or three a minute." 

They were, and it was not pleasant, this walk into 
Bapaume, though very interesting. 

It was when I came to an old farmhouse and inn — the 
shell of a place — on the left of the road (Duhamel-Equar- 
riseur. Telephone No. 30) that I knew the full menace of 
this hour was above and about. The enemy was firing a 
great number of shells into Bapaume. They came towards 
us with that rushing, howling noise which gives one a great 
fear of instant death, and burst with crashes among the 
neighbouring houses. They were high explosives, but 
shrapnel was bursting high, with thunder-claps, which left 
behind greenish clouds and scattered bullets down I went 
through the outer defences of Bapaume, walking with a 
General who was on his way to the town, and who pointed 
out the strength of the place. Lord! It was still horribly 
strong, and would have cost us many lives to take by 
assault. Three belts of wire, very thick, stood solid and 
strong, in a wide curve all round the town. The enemy 
had dug trenches quite recently, so that the earth was fresh 
and brown, and dug them well and perfectly. Only here 
and there had they been broken by our shell-fire, though 
some of the dug-outs had been blown in. 

Just outside Bapaume, on the south-east side, is an old 
citadel built centuries ago and now overgrown with fir- 
trees which would have given a great field of fire to Ger- 
man machine-gunners, and I went afterwards into snipers' 
posts, and stood at the entrance of tunnels and bomb-proof 
shelters, not going down or touching any of the litter about 
because of the danger lurking there in dark entries and in 
innocent-looking wires and implements,. There was a great 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 75 

litter everywhere, for the German soldiers had left behind 
large numbers of long-handled bombs and thousands of 
cartridges, and many tools and implements. 

Before getting into Bapaume I crossed the railway line 
from Arras, through Biefvillers, which was now on fire. 
They had torn up the rails here, but there was still the 
track, and the signal-boxes and signs in German. 

Im Bahnhof 
Nur lo Km. 

That is to say, the speed of trains was to be only lo kilo- 
metres an hour into the station. 

Another signboard directed the way for "Vieh" and 
"Pferde" (cattle and horses), and everywhere there were 
notice-boards to trenches and dug-outs: 

Nach I Stellung 
Fiir zwei Offizieren 

As 1 entered Bapaume I noticed first, if my memory 
serves, the Hotel de Commerce, with "garage" painted on 
a shell-broken wall, and immediately facing me an old 
wooden house with a shoot for flour. Many of the houses 
had collapsed as though built of cards, with all their roofs 
level with the ground. Others were cut in half, showing 
all their rooms and landings, and others were gutted in 
ways familiar to English people after Zeppelin raids. 
Higher up on the right, as I have said, rows of red-brick 
villas were burnt out, and smoke was rising in steady vol- 
umes from this quarter of the town. The church, a white 
stone building, was also smouldering. There were no Ger- 
mans in the town, unless men are still hiding there. The 
only living inhabitant was a little kitten which ran across 
the square and was captured by our patrols, who now have 
it as a pet. 

There were other men living early in the morning, but 
they are now dead. It was a company of German machine- 
gunners who held out as the last rear-guard. They fired 



76 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

heavily at our men, but were quickly overpowered. The 
first message that came back from the entering troops was 
laconic : 

"While entering Bapaume we came across a party the 
whole of which was accounted for. The mopping-up of 
Bapaume is now complete." 

I did not stay very long in the town. It was not a health 
resort. High explosives were crumpling every part of the 
town, and the buildings were falling. Pip-squeaks were 
flung about horribly, and when I came out with the Gen- 
eral and another officer a flush of them came yelling at us 
and burst very close, flinging up the ground only a few 
yards away. The roadway of "pave" had been hurled up 
in huge chumps of stone, and shrapnel was again breaking 
to the right of us. 1 struck across country eastwards to 
see the promised land, and on the way to the near ridge 
turned and stared back at Bapaume in the glow of the sun- 
set. Ours at last! 

The fires were still burning in the other villages, and it 
was such a scene of war as I saw first when Dixmude was 
a flaming torch and Pervyse was alight in the beginning of 
the world-conflict. ... At about half -past nine that night 
the enemy fired several quick rounds from his field-batteries. 
Then there was a strange silence, unbroken by any shell-fire. 
The Germans had fired their last shot in the battles of the 
Somme. 



lO 

The Rescue of Peronne 

March i8 
To-day at 7 a.m. a battalion of the Royal Warwicks of the 
48th Division entered Peronne, 

Standing alone that statement would be sensational 
enough. The French fought for Peronne desperately 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME TT 

through more than two years of war, and now it is the 
luck of the British troops to enter it, as yesterday we en- 
tered Bapaume, after a short action with the enemy's rear- 
guards. But the news does not stand alone. The whole of 
the old German line south of Arras, strong as one vast 
fortress, built by the labour of millions of men, dug and 
tunnelled and cemented and timbered, with thousands of 
machine-gun redoubts, with an immense maze of trenches, 
protected by forests of barbed wire, had slipped away as 
though by a landslide, and the enemy is in rapid retreat 
to new lines some miles away. As he goes he is laying 
fire and waste to the countryside. North-east of Bapaume, 
into which I went yesterday with our troops, and west of 
Peronne, scores of villages are burning. One of them, 
larger than a village, the town of Athies, is a flaming torch 
visible for miles around. Others are smouldering ruins, 
from which volumes of smoke are rolling up into the clear 
blue sky. Of all this great tract of France, which the enemy 
has been forced to abandon to avoid the menace of com- 
bined attack, there is no beauty left, and no homesteads, nor 
farms, but only black ruins and devastation everywhere. 
The enemy is adopting the full cruelty of war's malignancy. 
He has fouled the wells in his wake, so that if our soldiers* 
horses should drink there they will die. Over the water- 
ways he has burnt his bridges. Cross-roads have been 
mined, opening up enormous craters like those I saw yes- 
terday outside Bapaume. High-explosive traps have been 
placed in the way of our patrols, to scatter them in frag- 
ments if they lack caution. 

It is impossible to give our exact line at the present mo- 
ment. We have no exact line. Village after village has 
fallen into our hands since midday yesterday. Our cavalry 
patrols are over the hills and far away. Our infantry 
patrols are pushing forward unto new territory, so that 
only aeroplanes know the exact whereabouts. As one 
aviator has reported: 



78 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

"Our men are lighting fires and taking their dinners at 
places off the map. They are going into pubs which have 
been burnt out to find beer which is not there." 

North and east of Bapaume our patrols have gone beyond 
the villages of Rocquenes, Bancourt, Favreuil, and Sa- 
pignies. Intelligence officers riding out on bicycles to these 
places were scared to find themselves so lonely, and be- 
lieved that the enemy must be close at hand. But the enemy 
was still farther off. Our cavalry, working up past Logeast 
Wood, penetrated east of Acheit-le-Grand and turned the 
German line of Behagnies — Ytres. 

Much farther south, in the neighbourhood of Nesle, 
French and British cavalry patrols came into touch to-day, 
and one of our aviators reports that he saw French civilians 
waving flags and cheering them. 

The Germans have a cavalry screen behind their rear- 
guards. They were seen yesterday north of Bapaume and 
southwards beyond Roye. And some of them were chased 
by a British airman at a place called Ennemain. He 
swooped low like an albatross, and brought a man off his 
horse by a machine-gun bullet. Others stampeded from this 
terrible bird. 

This morning our troops were through Eterpigny be- 
yond Barleux, and found the villages of Misery and Mar- 
chelepot. There was some fighting last night and this 
morning in the neighbourhood of Peronne. The enemy had 
snipers and machine-gunners about, and kept some of their 
batteries back until the last possible moment, flinging 5-9's 
and smaller shells over our side of the lines, and firing 
heavily until about ten o'clock. Then the gun-fire ceased, 
and there was not a shot. His guns were going back along 
the dark roads, his rear-guards moved away, leaving behind 
them their great defensive works of the Bapaume Ridge, 
and burning villages. 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 79 

March 19 
Refusing to give battle, the enemy has retired still farther 
over open country east of Bapaume, and our cavalry patrols 
are in touch with his mounted rear-guards. The exact lo- 
cation is vague, as the movement continues, and our cavalry 
is in small units, moving cautiously between a large num- 
ber of burning villages, which are everywhere alight. Small 
parties of the enemy were encountered last night in the open 
near Ytres and Berthincourt, and some snipers in an omni- 
bus opened fire upon a cavalry patrol, and were scattered by 
an aeroplane which swooped low, sweeping them with 
machine-gun bullets. 

South of the Somme our cavalry got in touch with Ger- 
man cavalry at Rouy and with German cyclists at Potte. 
All the bridges have been destroyed to cover the enemy's 
retreat, as at Rouy and Breuil, and all the wells have been 
filled with filth and rubbish. 

It is a most extraordinary experience to follow up 
through this abandoned country from which the enemy has 
fled, as I have found to-day in tramping through the dis- 
trict of Peronne and into that deserted and destroyed town. 
A few weeks ago I went a journey to the new lines we 
had taken over from the French south of the Somme. Then 
it was under the full blast of shell-fire, and not a day passed 
without the enemy flinging high explosives into the ruined 
villages of Herbecourt, Estrees, Flaucourt, and Biaches. 
From Mont-St.-Quentin, on the flank of Peronne, he had 
the observation of all our ground, so that it was horrible 
to see that hill staring down on one, and by daylight in the 
open country one moved always under the menace of death. 
To-day that menace had gone. The evil spell had lifted, and 
we moved freely in the sight of Mont-St.-Quentin, unafraid 
and with a strange sense of safety. He had gone from there 
yesterday morning, and, at the same time, had crept away 
from the trenches at Biaches, and across his wooded bridges 
to Peronne, and out of this town to the open country, hurry- 
ing through the night to escape from our pursuit. 



80 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

I went down into Biaches, a wild chaos of trenches and 
dug-outs and ruin, and passed through the front Hne held 
by our troops until about 6,30 yesterday morning, and went 
with difficulty through the German barbed wire still uncut, 
so that we were tangled and caught in it. Then I passed 
into the old German lines, and went across the wooden 
causeway built by them over the marshes down to the bank 
of the Somme. On the other side of the river loop I saw 
for the first time Peronne, taken by the enemy in the autumn 
of 1 9 14, and fought for furiously by the French, who re- 
gained it for a while and lost it again. It was dead quiet 
over there. No shell burst over it, but a little smoke rolled 
above its houses. From that distance, the broad river's 
width, it did not look much destroyed. It was only after- 
wards that I saw how much. Several wooden bridges 
spanned the Somme, and I tried two of these to get across, 
but there were great gaps which I could not jump. Before 
leaving the enemy had broken them and tried to hide the 
damage from the view of our airmen by putting up straw 
screens. All the trees in the marshes had been slashed by 
our shell-fire. Empty barrels floated in the water with 
broken boats, and the old barge, called Notre Dame 
d' Amiens, was blown in half. Snipers' posts had been 
built, outfacing our lines, and German ammunition and 
bombs and coiled wire and a great litter of timber lay about. 

I managed at last to get into Peronne by a wide curve 
through the Faubourg de Paris, over the piled stones of a 
broken bridge with planks across the gaps put there by our 
soldiers so that the enemy could be followed in pursuit. He 
had been careful to check us as long as possible, though it 
was not very long, for an hour after his going the Royal 
Warwicks and some Londoners marched unto the Grande 
Place. Down the Faubourg de Paris all the trees had been 
cut down, so that they had crashed across the street, making 
a great barricade. Before going, firebrands had been at 
work, setting alight all the houses not already smashed by 
shell-fire. They were burning, when I passed them, so 



RETREAT FROM THE SOMME 81 

fiercely that the hot breath of the flames was upon my face. 
Even now it was possible to see that Peronne had once been 
a little town of old-world dignity and charm. Frontages of 
some of these gutted houses were richly carved in Renais- 
sance style, among them being the ruins of the Palais de 
Justice and the Hotel de Ville and the Maison Municipale. 
Here and there along the Rue St.-Fursy and in the Grande 
Place was an old French mansion built before the Revolu- 
tion, now just a skeleton of broken brickwork and timber. 
Though many houses were still standing enough to see they 
were houses, there was hardly one that had escaped the 
wrath of war. It was pitiful to see here and there old signs, 
showing the life of the town in peace, such as the "Librairie 
Nouvelle," the "Teinturerie Parisienne" belonging to Mme. 
Poitevineau, the Notary's house, full of legal books and 
papers scattered on a charred floor beneath a gaping roof, 
a shop for "articles de chasse" kept by one Monsieur 
Bourdin, Those signboards, reminding one of Peronne be- 
fore the war, were side by side with other signboards show- 
ing the way of German life until 6.30 yesterday morning. 
At the entrance to the town is a notice : "Durchgang bei 
Tage streng Verboten." 

Most houses are labelled, "Keller fiir 60 Mann." At the 
entrance to a dug-out below the town hall is the notice, 
"Verwundete und Kranke" (For wounded and sick). The 
only inhabitants of the Grande Place were a big black cat, 
looking sick and sorry for itself, and a dummy figure 
dressed as a French Zouave, sprawling below the pedestal 
of a statue to Catherine de Poix, heroine of the siege of 
1870. The statue had been taken away, like that of Faid- 
herbe in the square of Bapaume. On top of the pedestal 
had been laid the dummy figure in French uniform, but 
our soldiers removed it. Peronne was a dead town, like 
Ypres, like Bapaume, like all those villages in the wake of 
the German retreat. Over its old fortifications, built by 
Vauban, and over its marshes wild duck are flying. 



PART II 
ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 

I 

The Making of No Man's Land 

March 21 
For several days now I have been going with our advancing 
troops into towns, villages, and country abandoned by the 
enemy in his retreat. It has been a strange adventure, fan- 
tastic as a dream, yet with the tragedy of reality. The 
fantasy is in crossing over No Man's Land into the Ger- 
man lines, getting through his wire, and passing through 
trenches inhabited by his soldiers until a day or' two ago, 
travelling over roads and fields down which his guns and 
transport went, and going into streets and houses in which 
there are signs of his recent occupation. He has ruined 
all his roads, opening vast craters in them, and broken all 
his bridges, but our men have been wonderfully quick in 
making a way over these gaps, and this morning I mo- 
tored over the German trenches at Roye, zigzagging over 
this maze of ditches and dug-outs by bridges of planks be- 
fore getting to the roads behind his line. 

After passing the area of shell-fire on our side and his, 
the field of shell-craters, the smashed barns and houses and 
churches, the tattered tree-trunks, the wide belts of barbed 
wire, one comes to country where grass grows again, and 
where the fields are smooth and rolling, and where the 
woods will be clothed with foliage when spring comes to 
the world again — country strange and beautiful to a man 

82 



- ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 82 

like myself, who has been wandering through all the filth 
and frightfulness of the Somme battlefields. German 
sentry-boxes still stand at the cross-roads. German notice- 
boards stare at one from cottage walls, or where the vil- 
lages begin. Thousands of coils of barbed wire lie about 
in heaps, for the enemy relied a great deal upon this means 
of defence, and in many places are piles of shells which he 
has not removed. Gun-pits and machine-gun emplacements, 
screens to hide his roads from view, observation-posts built 
in tall trees, remain as signs of his military life a mile or 
two back from his front lines, but behind the trenches are 
the towns and villages in which he had his rest billets, and 
it is in these places that one sees the spirit and temper of the 
men whom we are fighting. The enemy has spared nothing 
on the way of his retreat. He has destroyed every village 
in his abandonment with a systematic and detailed destruc- 
tion. Not only in Bapaume and in Peronne has he blown 
up, or burnt, all the houses which were untouched by shell- 
fire, but in scores of villages he has laid waste the cottages 
of the peasants, and all their farms and all their orchards. 
At Rethonvillers this morning, to name only one village out 
of many, I saw how each house was marked with a white 
cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ 
was used to mark the work of the Devil. 

In Bapaume and Peronne, in Roye and Nesle and Lian- 
court, and all these places over a wide area, German soldiers 
not only blew out the fronts of houses, but with picks and 
axes smashed mirrors and furniture and picture-frames. 
As a friend of mine said, a cheap- jack would not give four- 
pence for anything left in Peronne, and that is true, also, 
of Bapaume. There is nothing but filth in those two towns; 
family portraits have been kicked into the gutters. I saw 
a picture of three children in Bapaume, and it was smeared 
with filth in the writing of a dirty word. The black bon- 
nets of old women who once lived in those houses lie about 
the rubbish-heaps, and by some strange, pitiful freak are 
almost the only signs left of the inhabitants who lived here 



84 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

before the Germans wrecked their houses. The enemy has 
left nothing that would be good for dwelling or for food. 
Into the wells he has pitched filth so that the people may not 
drink. 

But that is not the greatest tragedy I have seen. The 
ruins of houses are bad to see when done deliberately, even 
when shell-fire has spared them in the war zone. But worse 
than that is the ruin of women and children and living 
flesh. I saw that ruin to-day in Roye and Nesle. I was 
at first rejoiced to see how the first inhabitants were lib- 
erated after being so long in hostile lines. I approached 
them with a queer sense of excitement, eager to speak with 
them, but instantly when I saw those women and children 
in the streets, and staring at me out of windows, I was 
struck with a chill of horror. The women's faces were dead 
faces, sallow and mask-like, and branded with the memory 
of great agonies. The children were white and thin — so 
thin that their cheek-bones protruded. Hunger and fear 
had been with them too long. 

The Mayor of Nesle told me that after the first entry 
of the Germans on August 29, 19 14, and after the first bru- 
talities, the soldiers had behaved well, generally speaking. 
They were well disciplined, and lived on good terms with 
the people, as far as possible. Probably he tells the truth 
fairly, and I believe him. But the women with whom I spoke 
were passionate and hysterical, and told me other stories. 
I believe them too. Because these women, who are French, 
had to live with the men who were killing their husbands 
and brothers, and that is a great horror. They had to sub- 
mit to the daily moods of men who were sometimes sulky 
and sometimes drunk. The officers were often drunk. 
They had to see their children go hungry, for though the 
Germans gave them potatoes, sometimes they took away 
the hens, so that there were no eggs, and the cows, so that 
there was no milk, and the children suffered and were thin. 
On October 5, 19 14, the Kaiser came to Nesle with an escort 
of five motor-cars, and the soldiers lined the square and 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 85 

cheered him; but the women and children stared and were 
silent, and hated those white-haired men with the spiked 
hats. During the battles of the Somme many wounded 
passed through the town, and others came with awful stories 
of slaughter and fierce words against the English. Once 
twenty men of the 173rd Regiment came in. They were 
half mad, weeping and cursing, and said they were the sole 
survivors of their regiment. 

Then, quite recently, there came the rumour of a German 
retreat. On Thursday, March 15, the German commandant 
sent for the Mayor and announced the news. He gave 
orders for all the inhabitants to leave their houses at 6.30, 
and to assemble in the streets, while certain houses and 
streets indicated were to be destroyed. The German com- 
mandant, whose name was Herwaardt, said he greatly 
regretted this necessity. The work was to be carried out 
by his Oberlieutenant Baarth. The people wept at the de- 
struction of their homes, though the houses in the centre 
of Nesle were spared. But they were comforted by the 
promise of liberation. For a week previously the enemy 
had been withdrawing his stores. The garrison consisted 
of about 800 to 1000 men of the 38th Regiment of Chas- 
seurs and Cyclists. The gunners were the last to leave, and 
went away at midnight with the rear-guard of infantry. 
By half-past seven in the morning there was not a German 
soldier left in Nesle, and at half-past nine a British patrol 
entered, and the women and children surrounded our men, 
laughing and weeping. To-day they were being fed by 
British soldiers, and were waiting round the field-kitchens 
with wistful eyes. 

2 

The Letter of the Law 

March 23 
On both sides cavalry patrols are scouting in the woods and 
villages, and for a few days at least the situation has been 



86 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

extraordinarily like those early days of the war in October 
of 1914, when our cavalry was operating in Flanders, feel- 
ing forward cautiously to test the enemy's strength. For 
the first time since those days German Uhlans have again 
been seen on the Western Front. They have been seen mov- 
ing about the woods and on the skyline. 

Little parties of them are in hiding behind the broken 
walls of villages destroyed in the German retreat. Now 
and again they bump into our advanced posts and then bolt 
away, not seeking a fight. These are the manoeuvres of 
open warfare not seen on our Front since the trenches closed 
us in. Our calvary patrols are working in the same way. 
Yesterday one of them encountered some of the enemy 
on the road to St.-Quentin and very close to that town, 
where fires are still burning. Our mounted men were 
suddenly called to a halt by a sharp fusillade of rifle and 
machine-gun bullets. The enemy this time was unmounted 
and entrenched, and after reconnoitring this position our 
patrol galloped back. 

It is difficult to know always the exact whereabouts of 
the enemy's advanced posts, as they were scattered about 
the countryside without any definite trench line, so that 
officers of corps and divisional staffs who are going out to 
examine the lie of the land, with a secret hope of finding an 
adventure on the way, are taking out revolvers, which have 
long been idle. I found a young staff officer to-day fasten- 
ing his holster to his belt before starting out on his morn- 
ing's expedition, and he slapped it and laughed, and said, 
"I haven't done this for over two years. It is quite like 
old times." It brings back reminiscences to me also of old 
days, when with two comrades I moved about the roads of 
war ignorant of the enemy's position and narrowly escaping 
his advance-guards. But, after all, it is no joke, and I 
should hate to get into the middle of an enemy patrol some- 
where in this country of burnt and abandoned villages, 
through which I have been wandering with tired eyes in 



, ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 87 

the sight of all this destruction, so wanton, so brutal, and so 
ruthless. 

For the enemy has adopted the letter of the law in that 
code of cruelty which governs war, and I can think of 
nothing more damnable than the horror which came to some 
hundreds of poor souls, mostly women and children and old 
stricken men in the village of Rouy-le-Petit above the 
Somme. 

Many of them had been driven into this hamlet from 
neighbouring villages, which the Germans set on fire. Hud- 
dled in the streets of Rouy, they saw the smoke and flames 
rising from their homesteads, and they were terrorized and 
crushed. Presently the last German rear-guard went out 
from Rouy, not cheering and singing as they came in 
August of 1 91 4, but silent and grim, conscience-stricken 
also, it seemed, so the French people have told me, because 
of the law which made them do the things they had done. 
They had been friendly with the villagers before they 
smashed their houses, and had been good to the children 
before breaking their bedsteads and making them homeless. 
They said again and again in self-excuse, "It is war; it is 
the order of our high officers! We are bound to do it." 

The German guns rumbled through the street of Rouy, 
and went away with gunners and cyclists and infantry. 
Night came, and all the noise of distant artillery died down, 
and there was hardly the sound of a shot over all the 
country where for nearly three years there has been the 
ceaseless fire of artillery. Early next morning a British 
patrol entered the village, and the people crowded round, 
clasping the soldiers' hands and thanking God for deliver- 
ance, and telling of their hunger, which was near starving- 
point. Then the worst happened. Suddenly shells began 
to fall over the village, crashing through the roofs and 
flinging up the ground in the roadway. They were Ger- 
man shells fired by the German gunners who had left only 
a few hours before. They were not meant to kill the 
civilians who had been gathered at Rouy, all the women and 



88 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

children and old, weak men. They were meant to kill the 
British patrols, and so were lawful as an act of war. But 
one could not be done without the other, and there were 
civilians who were wounded in Rouy-le-Petit that day. 
Weeping and wailing, they rushed down into the cellars 
and took refuge there, while flights of shells followed and 
tore holes in rooms and walls, and filled the village with 
smoke and splinters. And that is the lawfulness of war 
and the horror of war. 

When the enemy left he blew up all the cross-roads and 
made many mine-craters along the way of his retreat. They 
have scarcely checked us at all, and a tribute of praise is 
due to our infantry and our labour battalions, who have 
been repairing those roads with quick, untiring industry. 
To-day I have met with much traffic of war, French as well 
as British traffic, the men in blue marching by the men in 
brown through country where both armies meet. The 
French soldiers were marching with their bands and col- 
ours through the ruined villages, and I never saw more 
splendid men even in the early days of the war, when 
the great armies of France went forward with a kind of 
religious passion and flung back the Germans from the 
Marne. Our own men had no bands and no colours. 
There was not the same sense of drama as they passed, 
but these clean-shaven boys of ours, hardened by foul 
weather, by frost, and rain-storms, and blizzard, go forward 
into the great waste, which the enemy had left behind him, 
in their usual matter-of-fact way, whistling a tune or two, 
passing a .whimsical word along the line, settling down to 
any old job that comes in a day's work, and finding as much 
comfort as they can at the end of a long day's march on 
the lee side of a shell-broken wall. 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 89 

3 

The Abandoned Country 

March 24 
After long days of tiring adventure in the wake of the 
German rear-guards, following through places only just 
evacuated, and tramping through the great ruin they have 
left behind them, I have tried to give some idea of the 
tragic drama of it all, the uncanny quietude of the aban- 
doned country, the frightful wreckage of towns and villages 
destroyed, not by shell-fire, but by picks and axes and fire- 
brands, the deep mine-craters blown under roads, the broken 
bridges across the Somme, the crowds of starved civilians 
surrounding our patrols in market squares where they had 
been herded while their homes were in flames around them, 
the little bodies of British troops advancing through barbed- 
wire entanglements into fortress positions like Bapaume 
and Peronne, and our cavalry patrols feeling their way 
forward into unknown country where the enemy's rear- 
guards are in hiding. 

That, in a few lines, is the historical picture of this 
strange new phase of warfare in which we have been push- 
ing forward during the past two weeks. But through it 
all, to me, an onlooker of these things, there has been one 
special theme of interest. It is the revelation of the Ger- 
man way of life Dehind his lines — these abundant lines — 
his military methods of defence and observation and or- 
ganization, and the domestic arrangements by which he has 
tried to make himself comfortable in the field of war. 
Along every step of the way by which he has retreated 
there are relics which show us exactly how our enemies 
lived and fought when they were hidden from us across 
No Man's Land, and their philosophy of life in war. All 
that is worth a little study. 

Everywhere — outside Bapaume and Peronne and Chaul- 



90 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

nes, and all those deserted places near the front lines — one 
ugly thing stares one in the face : German barbed wire. It 
is heavier, stronger stuff than ours or the French, with 
great cross-pieces of iron, and he has used amazing quan- 
tities of it in deep wide belts in three lines of defence be- 
fore his trench systems, and in all sorts of odd places, by 
bridges and roads and villages even far behind the trenches, 
to prevent any sudden rush of hostile infantry or to tear 
our cavalry to pieces should we break his lines and get 
through. His trenches were deeply dug, and along the 
whole line from which he has now retreated they are pro- 
vided with great concreted and timbered dug-outs leading 
into an elaborate system of tunnelled galleries perfectly 
proof from shell-fire, and similar to those which I have de- 
scribed often enough in the Somme battlefields. As a 
builder of dug-outs the German soldier has no equal. But 
in addition to these trench systems he made behind his lines 
a series of strong posts cunningly concealed and command- 
ing a wide field of fire with dominating observation over 
our side of the country. 

I found such a place quite by accident yesterday. My 
car broke down by a little wood near Roye looking across 
to Damery and Bouchoir, and the woody, wired fields which 
till a week ago were No Man's Land. When I strolled into 
the wood I suddenly looked down an enormous sand-pit 
covering an acre or so, and saw that it was a concealed 
fortress of extraordinary strength and organization — an 
underground citadel for a garrison of at least 3000 men 
perfectly screened by the wood above. Into the sand-banks 
on every side of the vast pit were built hundreds of cham- 
bers leading deeper down into a maze of tunnels which 
ran right round the central arena. Before leaving the 
enemy had busied himself with an elaborate packing up, 
and had taken away most of his movable property, but the 
"fixtures" still remained, and a litter of mattresses stuffed 
with shavings, empt)'^ wine-bottles, candles which had burnt 
down on the last night in the old home, old socks and old 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 91 

boots and old clothes no longer good for active service, 
and just the usual relics which people leave behind when 
they change houses. 

The officers' quarters were all timbered and panelled and 
papered, with glass windows and fancy curtains. They 
were furnished with bedsteads looted from French houses, 
and with mirrors, cabinets, washhand-stands, marble-top 
tables, and easy chairs. The cross-beams of the roofs were 
painted with allegorical devices and with legends such as 
"Gott mitt uns," "Furchtlos und treu," "In Treue fest." 

Each room had an enamelled or iron stove, so that the 
place must have been snug and warm, and I noticed in sev- 
eral of them empty cages from which singing birds had 
flown when German officers opened the doors before their 
their own flitting. 

The men's quarters were hardly less comfortable, and the 
whole place was organized as a self-contained garrison, with 
carpenters' shops and blacksmiths' sheds, and a quartermas- 
ter's stores still crowded with bombs and aerial torpedoes — 
thousands of them, which the enemy had left behind in his 
hurry — and kitchens with great stoves and boilers, and a 
Red Cross establishment for first aid, and concrete bath- 
houses with shower-baths and cigar-racks for officers, who 
smoke before and after bathing. Outside the artillery offi- 
cers' headquarters was a board painted in white letters, 
with the following couplet: 

Schnell und gut ist unser Schuss 
Deutscher Artilleristen Gruss. 

(Quick and good is our shooting 
Of the German gunners' greeting. ) 

Shell-craters in the open arena showed the French gun- 
ners had returned the greeting, and that the garrison of 
this citadel had done well to arrange their life mainly as a 
subterranean existence. But at times when the French guns 



92 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

were quiet and when the French sun was shining they had 
built alfresco corners with garden seats and tables, round 
which enormous stacks of wine-bottles were littered, show- 
ing, as I have seen in all these abandoned places, the enor- 
mous quantity of drink consumed by German officers in 
their ligtiter moments. 

This citadel in the wood is only one out of similar strong 
points all along the lines now abandoned by the enemy. 
Peronne, with Mont-St.-Quentin on its flank, and with the 
Somme winding around it, and with forests of barbed wire 
in the marshes below it, could be called impregnable if any 
place may defy great armies. It was wonderfully fortified 
with great industry and great skill for over two years, and 
walking into these places now, marvelling at their strength, 
I can only ask one question, which certainly the enemy will 
find it hard to answer. Why has he abandoned such for- 
midable strongholds? It seems to me that there is only 
one answer. It is because they had to go and not because 
they wanted to go. It was because they have no longer the 
strength to hold their old line against the growing gun- 
power and the growing man-power of the British Armies, 
and have been compelled to attempt a new strategy which 
will save their reserves and shorten their line. 

Behind the lines the German officers and men lived com- 
fortably in French billets, and organized amusements for 
battalions in rest. At Bapaume they had a little theatre 
with painted scenery. Two of the wings were among the 
few things left in the rubbish-heaps of that poor destroyed 
town, btirnt and sacked by the Germans before they left, 
and when I went in there with our troops some Australian 
soldiers propped them up against the walls of a gutted 
house and inscribed upon them in white chalk the name 
"Maison de la Co-ee," inviting their comrades to walk up 
and see the finest show on earth. In Nesle the Germans 
turned the Cafe de Commerce into their casino, and played 
military bands, whose music did not cheer the hearts of 
wan women whose children were starving 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 93 

Strange fellows! Who knows what to make of them? 
The French people just liberated from their rule, which was 
a reign of terror in the severity of its official regulations, 
contradict themselves in expressing their white-hot hatred 
of the German character and their liking for the individual 
soldiers who were quartered on them. 

"They were kind to the children . . . but they burnt our 
houses." — "Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went 
away. . . . But he helped to smash up the neighbours' fur- 
niture with an axe." — "The lieutenant was a good fellow 
. . . but he carried out the orders of destruction." 

A woman told me, with a quivering rage in her voice, 
that a German officer rode his horse into her room one day. 
Another woman showed me the cut down her hand and 
arm which she had received from a German soldier who 
tried to force his way into her house at night. Other stories 
have been told me by women white with passion. . . . Yet 
it is clear that, on the whole, the Germans behaved in a 
kindly, disciplined way until those last nights, when they 
laid waste so many villages and all that was in them. 



4 
The Cure of Voyennes 

March 25 
In the village of Voyennes, not far from Ham, and one of 
the few hamlets not utterly destroyed, because the people 
of the district were herded here while their own houses were 
being burnt, I went into the ruins of the church. It was 
easy to see how the flames had licked about its old stones, 
scorching them red, and how the high oak roof had come 
blazing down before the walls and pillars had given way. 
Everything had been licked down by flame except one figure 



94 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

oil an encalcined fragment of wall. Only one hand of the 
Christ there had been burned, and the body hanging on 
the Cross was unscathed, like so many of those Calvaries 
which I have seen in shell-fired places. 

But this place had not been touched by shell-fire, for it 
had been far beyond the range of French or British guns; 
it had been destroyed wilfully. The village around had 
been spared because of the large number of people driven 
into it from the neighbouring countryside, and when I 
called upon the priest who lives opposite the ruin of the 
church, where he served God and the people of his little 
parish, I heard the story of its burning. 

It was a queer thing to me to sit to-day in that room of 
the French presbytery talking to the old Cure. Just a week 
before, on Sunday, at the very hour of my visit, which was 
at midday, that old church outside the windqw had be- 
come a blazing torch, and this priest, who loved it, had 
wept tears as hot as its flames, and in his heart was the 
fire of a great agony. He sat before me, a tall old man 
of the aristocratic type, with a finely chiselled face, but 
thin and gaunt, and as sallow as though he had been raised 
from the dead. If I could put down his words as he spoke 
them to me with passion in his clear, vivid French, with 
gestures of those transparent hands which gave a deeper 
meaning to his words, it would be a great story, revealing 
the agony of the French people behind the German lines. 
For the story of this village of Voyennes is just that of all 
the villages on the enemy's side of the barbed wire. 

Here in a few little streets about an old church were the 
bodily suffering, the spiritual torture, the patient courage, 
the fight against despair, the brooding but hidden fears, 
which have been the life over a great tract of France since 
August 1914. "For a year," said M. le Cure Caron, "my 
people here have had not a morsel of meat and not a drop 
of wine, and only bad water in which the Germans put their 
filth. They gave us bread which was disgusting, and bad 
haricots and potatoes, and potatoes and haricots, and not 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 95 

enough even, so that the children became wan and the 
women weak. The American people sent us some food- 
stuffs, but the Germans took the best of them, and in any 
case we were always hungry. But those things do not mat- 
ter, those physical things. It was the suffering of the spirit 
that mattered, and, monsieur, we suffered mentally so much 
that it almost destroyed our intelligence, it almost made us 
silly, so that even now we can hardly think or reason, for 
you will understand what it meant to us French people. 
We were slaves after the Germans came in and settled 
down upon us, and said, 'W& are at home; all here is ours.' 
They ordered our men to work, and punished them with 
prison for any slight fault. They were the masters of our 
women, they put our young girls among their soldiers, they 
set themselves out deliberately at first to crush our spirit, 
to beat us by terror, to subdue us to their will by an iron 
rule. They failed, and the}' were astonished. *We cannot 
understand you people,' they said , 'you are so proud, your 
women are so proud,' And that was true, sir. Some 
women, not worthy of the name of French women, were 
weak — it was inevitable, alas! — but for the most part they 
raised their heads and said, 'We are French, we will never 
give in to you, not after one year, nor two years, nor three 
years, nor four years.' 

"The Germans asked constantly, 'When do you think the 
war will end?' We answered, 'Perhaps in five years, but 
in the end we will smash you,' and this made them very 
angry, so our people went about with their heads up, scorn- 
ful, refusing to complain against any severity or any hard- 
ship. 

"Secretly among ourselves it was different. We could 
get no news for months except lies. We knew nothing of 
what was happening. Starvation crept closer upon us. We 
were surrounded by the fires of hell. As you see, we are in 
the outer section of the great Somme battle line, and very 
close to it. For fifty hours at a time the roar of guns swept 



96 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

round us week after week, and month after month, and the 
sky blazed around us. We were afraid of the temper of 
the German officers after the defeat on the Marne, and after 
the battles of the Somme Germany was like a wounded 
tiger, fierce, desperate, cruel. Secretly, though our people 
kept brave faces, they feared what would happen if the 
Germans were forced to retreat. At last that happened, 
and after all we had endured the days of terror were hard 
to bear. From all the villages around, one by one, people 
were driven out, young women and men as old as sixty 
were taken away to work for Germany, and an orderly de- 
struction began, which ended with the cutting down of our 
orchards and ruin everywhere. The Commandant before 
that was a good man and a gentleman, afraid of God and 
his conscience. He said, 'I do not approve of these things. 
The world will have a right to call us barbarians.' He 
asked for forgiveness because he had to obey orders, and 
I gave it him. An order came to take away all the bells 
of the churches and all the metal-work. I had already 
put my church bells in a loft, and I showed them to him, 
and said, 'There they are.' He was very sorry. This man 
was the only good German officer I have met, and it was 
because he had been fifteen years in America and had 
married an American wife and escaped from the spell of 
his country's philosophy. Then he went away. Last Sun- 
day, a week ago, at this very hour when the people were 
all in their houses under strict orders, and already the 
country was on fire with burning villages, a group of sol- 
diers came. outside there with cans of petroleum, which 
they put into the church. Then they set fire to it, and 
watched my church burn in a great bonfire. At this very 
hour a week ago I watched it bum. . . . That night the 
Germans went away through Voyennes, and early in the 
morning, up in my attic, looking through a pair of glasses 
I saw four horsemen ride in. They were English soldiers, 
and our people rushed out to them. Soon afterwards 
came some Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the Colonel gave me 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 97 

the news of the outer world to which we now belong after 
our years of isolation and misery. Our agony had ended. 
. . . The Germans know they were beaten, monsieur; a 
Commandant of Ham said, *We are lost.' After the bat- 
tles of the Somme the men groaned and wept when they 
were sent off to the Front. 'God,' they cried, 'the horror 
of the French and English gun-fire; O Christ, save us!* 
During the battles of the Somme the wounded poured 
back, a thousand or more a day, and Ham was one great 
hospital of bleeding flesh. The German soldiers have bad 
food and not enough of it, and their people are starving 
as we starved. The German officers behaved to their men 
with their usual brutality. I have seen them beat the sol- 
diers about the head while those men stood at attention, 
not daring to say a word, but as soon as the officers are out 
of the way, the men say, *We will cut those fellows' throats 
after the war. We have been deceived ! After the war we 
will make them pay.' " 

So the Cure talked to me, and I have only given a few 
of his words, but what I have given is enough. 



The Chateau of Liancourt 

March 28 
Day by day our soldiers push farther forward across the 
country which the Germans have laid waste, so that even 
when peace comes there will be no dwelling-places where 
there were once fine chateaux of France, and thriving little 
towns and hamlets clustering about old farmsteads, and 
great barns; nor any orchards, where for miles there was 
white blossom in the Aprils of many centuries, and ruddy 
fruit in all the autumns of the past. 

These men of ours take all this desolation in a matter-of- 



98 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

fact way, as they take everything in this war, and pass al- 
most without thought scenes more than usually fantastic 
in piled ruins, and it is only by some such phrase or two as 
"Did you ever see the like?" or "They've made a pretty 
mess of that!" that they express their astonishment in this 
wide belt of death which the enemy has left along his 
tracks. Secretly I think some of them are stirred with a 
sense of the sinister drama of it all, and are a little stag- 
gered by a ruthlessness of war beyond even their own 
earlier experience, which covers the battle of the Somme. 
All this is something new, something which seems unnec- 
essary, something more devilish, and our men go poking 
about among the burnt houses and into the German under- 
ground defences searching among the rubbish and examin- 
ing the relics of the old life there, as though to discover 
the secret of the men who have gone away, the secret of 
"Old Fritz," their enemy. 

Sometimes they find messages written to them by the 
enemy in good English, but with dark meanings. In one 
German dug-out the other day an officer of ours found 
a note scribbled on the table. 

"We are going away, Tommy dear, and leave some 
empty bottles of Rhein wine. It is the best wine in the 
world. Take care it is not the best for you." 

"When are they coming?" was another note. "Enlist 
at once. Tommy my boy." 

But those things do not explain. It is difficult to find any 
clue to the character of these German soldiers, who have 
left behind them proofs of wonderful labour and skill, and 
proofs of great sentiment and religious piety, and proots 
of an ordered cruelty worse than anything seen in France 
since barbarous days. How can one explain? 

Yesterday I went to a village called Liancourt. There is 
a big chateau there. Even now at a httle distance it seems 
a place of old romance, with a strong, round tower and 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 99 

high peaked roofs, and great wings of dark old brick. In 
such a place Henri IV lived. It was centuries old when 
the Revolution made its heraldic shields meaningless, but 
until a year or two ago its walls were still hung with 
tapestries, and its halls were filled with Empire furniture, 
and its great vaulted cellars with wine. When the Ger- 
mans came they made it a hospital for their wounded — 
their Red Cross is still painted on one of the sloping 
roofs — and though it was far behind their lines, surrounded 
it with barbed wire which is now red with rust, and built 
enormous dug-outs in its grounds in case French guns 
should ever come near. When the Germans went a few 
days ago they left but an empty shell. They stripped 
the walls of panelling and tapestry, they took all the 
clocks and pictures and furniture and carpets, and I 
wandered yesterday through scores of rooms empty of 
everything so that my footsteps echoed in them. The 
Chateau of Liancourt had been looted from attic to cellar. 
But quite close to the chateau the Germans have left the 
bodies of many of their soldiers, as all over this country, 
by roadsides and in fields, there are the graves of German 
dead. Here there was one of their cemeteries, strongly 
walled with heavy blocks of stone, each grave with its big 
wooden headpiece, with a stone chapel built for the burial 
service, and with a "Denkmal," or monument, in the centre 
of all these dead. It was a memorial put up by Hessian 
troops in July 191 5 to the honour of men taken on the field 
of honour. 

In this graveyard one sees the deep respect paid by the 
Germans to the dead — French dead as well as German 
dead. . . . But just a hundred yards away is another 
graveyard. It is the cemetery of the little church in the 
grounds of the chateau, and is full of vaults and tombs 
where lay the dust of French citizens, men, women, and 
children, who died before the horror of this war. 

The vaults had been opened by pickaxes. The tomb- 
stones were split across and graves exposed. Into these 



100 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

little houses of the dead — a young girl had lain in one of 
them — rubbish had been flung. From one vault the cof- 
fin had been taken away. . . . The church had been a little 
gem, with a tall, pointed spire. Not by shell-fire, but by 
an explosive charge placed there the day before the Ger- 
mans went away the spire had been flung down and one 
end of the church blown clean away. The face of its clock 
lay upon the rubbish-heap. The sanctuary had been opened 
and the reliquaries smashed. The statues of the saints 
had been overturned, and the vestments of the priest 
trampled and torn. 

I went into the village of Cremery not far away. Here 
also the graves had been opened in the churchyard, and in 
the church the relics of saints had been looted — a queer 
kind of loot for German homes — and in the sacristy fine 
old books of prayer and music lay tattfered on the floor. 

I went again yesterday to the great area of destroyed 
villages which the enemy left behind him on his retreat to 
St.-Quentin, and from Holnon Wood, which our cavalry 
were the first to enter a few weeks ago, looked across the 
open country between our outposts and that old city whose 
cathedral rises as a grey mass above the last ridge, so near 
and so clear when the sunlight falls upon it that our men 
can see the tracery of the windows. It still stands un- 
broken and beautiful, though houses have been destroyed 
around it to clear the enemy's field of fire. German officers 
use its towers as observation-posts, and can see every 
movement of our men in the fields below. 

"They snipe us with five-point-nines," said a young of- 
ficer, smoking a cigarette, with his back to a broken wall 
in a heap of ruins. "They scatter 'em about on the off- 
chance of hitting some one, and you never can tell where 
they are likely to drop." 

Some of them came whirring across to the Holnon 
Wood and down into the village of Francilly as I stood 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 101 

looking across to Savy Wood, but not close enough to 
hurt any one. It is the queerest thing to be in this part of 
our Front. Go a little too far down a road, mistake one 
village for another — and it is quite easy, for they all look 
alike in ruin — and if you are an absent-minded man you 
can get into the enemy's lines without realizing your 
danger. Yesterday only occasional shell-bursts and short 
spasms of machine-gun fire from the edge of Savy Wood 
came to prove that here masses of men are watching out 
to kill each other. Pigeons cooed in the woods. The 
ground at my feet was spangled with anemones, and the 
sunlight chased shadows across the fields of spring below 
the city, where soon the streets may be noisy with battle. 
Our men, living amidst ruin this side of St.-Quentin, have 
settled down to this life of open warfare as though they 
had known nothing else. Whether the tragedy of it all 
sinks into them I do not know, but they whistle music-hall 
tunes in the vast rubbish-heaps which were once old cha- 
teaux of France, and sleep and stack their rifles in ancient 
crypts among the coffins of French aristocrats who died 
before, or just a little after, the French Revolution, and 
find shelter from wind and rain in poor little sacristies 
filled with statues of saints adjoining churches wrecked 
by explosive charges before the German soldiers went 
their way. 

One sees the strangest contrasts of life and death in all 
this countryside, as when yesterday I came across a High- 
lander playing his pipes in a wild and merry way on an 
avalanche of old red bricks which once formed part of the 
mansion of Caulaincourt, with many terraces lined with 
white statues of Greek goddesses now lying maimed and 
mutilated among the great rubbish-heaps. 

By the roadside on my way I saw some English soldiers 
resting, and close to them was a marble tablet stuck up In 
a heap of earth. I read the words carved on the stone, 
and it told me that here was the heart of Anne- Josephine 



102 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Barandier, Marquise de Caulaincourt, who died in Paris 
on January 17, 1830. 

Poor dead heart of Madame la Marquise! In a vault 
near by all the tablets of her family had been smashed, 
and the coffins laid bare, but there was no little niche to 
show where the lady's heart had been. 

Outside in the churchyard there was a great tomb to the 
memory of the French soldiers who fell in 1871, and next 
to them the graves of German soldiers killed in this war, 
and a wooden cross to Second Lieutenant Nixon, of the 
Royal Flying Corps, killed here behind the German lines 
on July 19, 191 5. 



The Old Women of Tincourt 

March 29 
One scene on the roadside of war will remain sharp in my 
memory among all these scenes in the wilderness which the 
Germans have made behind them, through which I have 
been passing. It is because of the courage of old women 
who sat there on the way. 

It was beyond Peronne, and through the open country 
where our cavalry patrols are working, and in the village 
of Tincourt. Up beyond Lagnicourt the guns yesterday 
were firing heavily, and sharp gusts of wind blew forward 
the noise of a greater and farther bombardment, deep and 
low. Quite close, the village of Roisel, taken by our troops 
the day beiore, was still smouldering, and all around for 
miles was the long black trail of war with hundreds of vil- 
lages and farmsteads laid low by fire and dynamite before 
the Germans left them in retreat. But in Tincourt only 
the outer streets and the neighbouring, separate buildings 
had been destroyed. The main part of the village was still 
standing, though the enemy had shelled it a little the day 
before. When I came into it I saw that it was one of the 
few places left by the Germans, because it was a concen- 



ON THE TRAH. OF THE ENEMY 103 

tration camp of civilians driven in from other villages 
while they were being smashed. 

The people were gathered about the roadway, about two 
hundred of them, sitting or standing among piles of 
bundles, like refugees in the old days of the war. There 
were many old, old women among them in black dresses 
and bonnets, and a group of young girls, of fifteen or so, 
and small boys and children in arms. They were looking 
down the road anxiously, and I found that they were wait- 
ing for British lorries and ambulances to take them away 
to safer country, beyond the reach of German shell-fire. 
They were people who had just been liberated from hostile 
rule. The grey tide of the German army had swept back 
from them, and they found themselves once again free 
people of France, with news of France, and of the world 
on the other side of the trenches and the wire which for 
two years and a half had shut them in with the enemy. 

I spoke with the old women, these brave old grand- 
mothers who were sitting homeless and houseless on their 
bundles in the midst of a ruined countryside, within reach 
of the guns. They were not weeping but smiling. They 
were not afraid but scornful of the perils through which 
they had passed. 

They were thin because they had stinted for their grand- 
children, and they had suffered great misery, but they held 
their old grey heads high, and said, "For our sons' sake we 
endured all things." 

They are the grandmothers of the babes who know noth- 
ing of all this war, and one day will be told, and the 
mothers of men who have fought and died, and who fight 
and die with supreme self-sacrifice in the shambles of this 
war. They are women worthy of hero sons, themselves 
heroic. They were not passionate against the enemy, only 
contemptuous of him, and of his rule of them. They liked 
some of the German soldiers and made no accusations of 
individual brutality, but cursed the spirit which had laid 
waste their villages, and destroyed their houses and 



104 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

orchards, and taken away their young girls and all men 
to the age of fifty. They spoke with the dispassionate 
eloquence of people who have been in earthquakes and ship- 
wrecks and tornadoes. German cruelty was natural, in- 
evitable, and unarguable, and the soldiers who had done 
these things were the slaves of the fate which ordained 
their acts. 

"I was taken to Roisel from my own village farther 
back," said one old lady. "They burnt my house and my 
neighbours' houses and drove us forward. Roisel was all 
in flames when we passed through. The fires came out of 
the houses, and the heat of them scorched us. Then we 
came to Tincourt, and yesterday they shelled us. The lit- 
tle ones were afraid. Our young girls were weeping and 
full of terror. 

"You will understand that it is hard to see one's village 
destroyed, and to see one's sisters taken away, and not to 
know what is to happen next. For us old women it was not 
so bad. We are too old to weep, having wept too much. 
We thought of our sons who have died for France. We 
showed ourjscorn for the enemy by hiding our fear." 

"They know they are beaten," said the old ladies. "They 
ask always for peace. They are afraid of the punishment 
which God holds in store for them for all this wickedness." 

"Yes," said one of the old women, "they will be 
punished. What we have suffered they will suffer. All 
this" — she thrust up a skinny hand towards the ruined land 
behind her — "must be paid for." 

"It is William who will pay," said another old woman, 
"with his head." 

It was like the talk of the Greek Fates, the three old 
women who held the thread and spun the thread and 
snipped the thread — this talk of the old women of Tin- 
court, so passionless, so hard, so fair, so certain. But I 
marvelled at their courage, sitting there on their bundles, 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 105 

after tramping away from their blazing homesteads, wait- 
ing for British lorries to take them away from a place 
which, even then, was registered by German guns, with 
the young girls, and the babies who were born under hos- 
tile rule. 

7 
The Agony of War 

March 31 
I AM moved to write again of the old men and women and 
of the young women and children who have been liberated 
by our advance, because I have just been among these peo- 
ple again, seeing their tears, hearing their pitiful tales, 
touched by hands which plucked my sleeve so that I should 
listen to another story of outrage and misery. 

All they told me, and all I have seen, builds up into a 
great tragedy. These young girls, who wept before me, 
shaken by the terror of their remembrance, these old brave 
men, who cried like children, these old women who did 
not weep but spoke with strange, smiling eyes as to life's 
great ironies, revealed to me in a fuller way the enormous 
agony of life behind the German lines now shifted back a 
little so that these people have escaped. It is an agony 
which includes the German soldiers, themselves enslaved, 
wretched, disillusionized men, under the great doom which 
has killed so many of their brothers, ordered to do the 
things many of them loathe to do, brutal by order even 
when they have gentle instincts, doing kind things by 
stealth, afraid of punishment for charity, stricken both by 
fear and hunger. 

"Why do you go ?" they were asked by one of the women 
who have been speaking to me. 

"Because we hope to escape the new British attacks," 
they answered. "The English gun-fire smashed us to death 
on the Somme. The officers know we cannot stand that 
horror a second time." 

They spoke as men horribly afraid. 



106 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

"I was the bailiff of Mme. la Marquise de Caulalncourt," 
said an elderly man, taking off his peaked cap to show me 
a coronet on the badge. "When the Germans came first to 
our village they seized all the tools, and all the farm-carts, 
and all the harvesting, and then they forced us all to work 
for them, the men at three sous an hour, the women at two 
sous an hour, and prison for any who refused to work. 
From the chateau they sent back the tapestries, the pic- 
tures, and anything which pleased this Commandant or 
that, until there was nothing left. Then in the last days 
they burnt the chateau to the ground and all the village 
and all the orchards." 

"It was the same always," said a woman. "There were 
processions of carts covered with linen, and underneath 
the linen was the furniture stolen from good houses." 

"Fourteen days ago," said an old man who had tears in 
his eyes as he spoke, "I passed the night in the cemetery 
of Vraignes. There were one thousand and fifteen of us 
people from neighbouring villages, some in the church and 
some in the cemetery. They searched us there and took all 
our money. Some of the women were stripped and 
searched. In the cemetery it was a cold night and dark, 
but all around the sky was flaming with tl^e fire of 
our villages — Poeuilly, Bouvincourt, Marteville, Trefgon, 
Monchy, Bernes, Hancourt, and many more. The people 
with me wept and cried out loud to see their dear places 
burning and all this hell. Terrible explosions came to our 
ears. There were mines everywhere under the roads. Then 
Vraignes was set on fire and burnt around us, and we were 
stricken with a great terror. Next day the Enghsh came 
when the last Uhlans had left. 'The English !' we shouted, 
and ran forward to meet them, stumbling, with outstretched 
hands. Soon shells began to fall in Vraignes. The enemy 
was firing upon us, and some of the shells fell very close 
to a barn quite full of women and children. 'Come away,' 
said your English soldiers, and we fled farther." 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 107 

Russian prisoners were brought to work behind the 
lines, and some French prisoners. They were so badly fed 
that they were too weak to work. 

"Poor devils!" said a young Frenchwoman. "It made 
my heart ache to see them." 

She watched a French prisoner one day through her 
window. He was so faint that he staggered and dropped 
his pick. A German sentry knocked him down with a 
violent blow on the ear. The young Frenchwoman opened 
the window, and the blood rushed to her head. 

"Sale bete !" she cried to the German sentry. 

He spoke French and understood, and came under the 
window. 

" 'Sale bete' ? . . . For those words you shall go to 
prison, madame." 

She repeated the words, and called him a monster, and 
at last the man spoke in a shamed way and said : 

"Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre. C'est cruelle, la 
guerre !" 

This man had kinder comrades. Pitying the Russian 
prisoners, they gave them stealthily a little brandy and 
cigarettes, and some who were caught did two hours' ex- 
tra drill each day for a fortnight. 

"My three sisters were taken away when the Germans 
left," said a young girl. She spoke her sisters' names, 
Yvonne, Juliette, and Madeleine, and said they were eight- 
een and twenty-two and twenty-seven, and then, turning 
away from me, wept very bitterly. 

"They are my daughters," said a middle-aged woman. 
"When they were taken away I went a little mad. My 
pretty girls ! And all our neighbours' daughters have gone, 
up from sixteen years of age, and all the men-folk up to 
fifty. They have gone to slavery, and for the girls it is a 
great peril. How can they escape?" 

How can one write of these things? For the women it 
was always worst. Many of them had surpassing courage, 
but some were weak and some were bad. The bad women 



108 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

preyed on the others in a way so vile that it seems incred- 
ible. There was no distinction of class or sex in the forced 
labour of the harvest-fields, and delicate women of good 
families were forced to labour on the soil with girls strong 
and used to this toil. There were many who died of weak- 
ness and pneumonia and under- feeding. 

"Are you not afraid of being called barbarians for ever?" 
asked a woman of a German officer who had not been 
brutal, but, like others, had tried to soften the hardships 
of the people. 

"Madame," he said very gravely, "we act under the or- 
ders of people greater than ourselves, and we are bound 
to obey, because otherwise we should be shot. But we hate 
the cruelty of war, and we hate those who have made it. 
One day we will make them pay for the vile things we have 
had to do." 

What strange little dramas, what tragic stories I have 
heard in these recent days! I have told the tale of one 
old priest. Here is the tale of another, as he told it to me 
in the midst of ruin. 

He is the Abbe Barbe, of Muille, near Ham. In the 
neighbourhood was an enemy, too, a Frenchman, who was 
once a Christian brother, and now, unfrocked, a drunkard 
and a debauchee. He accused the abbe of having a tele- 
phone in his cellar from which he sent messages to Paris 
about German military secrets. One night there came a 
bang at the door of the abbe's study. Five soldiers en- 
tered with fixed bayonets and arrested the old priest. He 
was taken to the fortress of Ham and put into a dark cell 
with one small iron grating and a plank bed. Here he was 
interrogated by a German officer, who told him of the 
grave accusation against him. 

"Search my cellars," said the abbe. "H there is a tele- 
phone there, shoot me as a spy. H not, set me free, after 
your court martial." 

There was no court martial. After four days in the 
darkness the abbe was taken away by German soldiers and 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 109 

set down, not at Muille, but at Voyennes, ten kilometres or 
so away, and forbidden to go back to his village or his 
church. He went back a few days ago, when the Germans 
left. When he went into his house he found that it had 
been sacked. All the rare old books in his library had been 
burnt. There was nothing left to him. 

"Sir," said a sister of charity, "these people whom you 
see here were brave but tortured in spirit and in body. Be- 
yond the German lines they have lived in continual fear 
and servitude. The tales which they have told us must 
make the good God weep at the wickedness of his creatures. 
There will be a special place in hell, perhaps, for the Em- 
peror William and his gang of bandits." 

She spoke the words as a pious aspiration, this little pale 
woman with meek and kindly eyes, in her nunJs dress. 

8 

Cavalry in Action 

April 2 
Our troops have advanced smce yesterday on to a line of 
high ground overlooking St.-Quentin and sweeping in a 
curve round the wood of Holnon, which is the last strong 
point between us and the trenches immediately before the 
cathedral city. This morning our outposts were in Bihu- 
court and Villecholles, and advancing to Maissemy, thereby 
holding all the roads except one on the western side of the 
Hindenburg-Siegfried line between Peronne and St.- 
Quentin. Our enemy is shelling the villages from which 
he has lately retired with lone-range guns, and we are now 
drawing very close to his new line of trenches and fixed 
positions. 

Northwards of Peronne and cast of Bapaume our troops 
have taken Doignies, above the forest of Havrincourt, and 
hold Neuville and Ruyaulcourt to the south of it, so that 
this great wood is encircled like that of Holnon; and the 



110 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

enemy must escape quickly from the shelter of the trees or 
be trapped there. 

Northwards again, above Bapaume, we have made to-day 
a heavy and successful attack south-east of Croisilles, where 
a few days ago there was sharp fighting and several Ger- 
man counter-attacks, because the position threatens that 
sector of the Hindenburg line which is immediately behind 
the village striking down at an angle south-eastwards in 
front of Queant, from which we are three miles distant. 
Two small villages below Croisilles, named Longatte and 
Ecoust-St.-Mien, have also fallen to us. 

Our attack to-day was preceded by great gun-fire, and 
the enemy has defended himself with desperate courage, 
acting upon Hindenburg' s orders that the position must be 
held at all costs. We have brought back over a hundred 
prisoners, and have inflicted great losses upon the garrison. 

One of the most interesting and extraordinary features 
in all the fighting east of Bapaume has been the work of 
our cavalry squadrons in reconnaissance and attack. I con- 
fess that, after two and a half years of trench warfare, I 
was utterly sceptical of the value of mounted troops, in 
spite of the little stunt (as they called it) south of High 
Wood, after we took the Bazentins and Longueval in July 
of last year, when the Royal Dragoons and Deccan Horse 
rode out and brought back prisoners. Conditions have 
changed since then by a great transformation scene, owing 
to the enemy's abandonment of his old fortress positions 
on the Somme under our frightful onslaught of gun-fire. 
The country into which we have now gone is beyond the 
great wide bfelt of shell-craters, which made the battlefields 
of the Somme a wild quagmire of deep pits and ponds. The 
roads between the ruined villages are wonderfully smooth 
and good where they have not been mined, and the fields 
are as nature and French husbandry left them after last 
year's harvest. Then there has been a glorious absence of 
heavy shell-fire while the enemy has been drawing back his 
guns to emplacements behind the Hindenburg line ; and this 



ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY 111 

to cavalry, as well as to infantry, makes all the difference 
between heaven and hell. So the cavalry has had its chance 
again after the old far-off days when they rode up the 
Mont des Cats and chased Uhlans through Meteren, and 
scouted along the Messines Ridge in the autumn of 19 14. 

There have been no great sensational episodes, no shock 
of lance against lance in dense masses, no cutting up of 
rear-guards nor slashing into a routed army, but there 
has been a great deal of good scouting work during the 
past three weeks. Eight villages have been taken by the 
Canadian cavalry under General Seely, and they have cap- 
tured a number of prisoners and machine-guns. They have 
liked their hunting. I have seen the Indian cavalry riding 
across the fields with their lances high, and it was a great 
sight, and as strange as an Arabian Nights tale in this 
land of France, to see those streams of brown-bearded men, 
as handsome as fairy-book princes, with the wind blowing 
their khaki turbans. 

Night after night our cavalry have gone out in patrols, 
the leader ahead and alone; two men following; behind 
them a small body keeping in touch. They ride silently 
like shadows, with no clatter of stirrup or chink of bit. 
They find the gaps in the enemy's wire, creep close "" j his 
infantry outposts, ride very deftly into the charred ruins 
of abandoned villages, and come back with their news of 
the enemy's whereabouts. A week ago one of their patrols 
went into the Forest of Holnon, which is still held by the 
enemy, and listened to Germans talking. Our men were 
undiscovered. They took the villages by sweeping round 
on both sides in a great gallop, with their lances down, and 
the enemy fled at the first sight of them. 

When the cavalry charged at Equancourt, a body of 
British infantry, who had come on to the ground six hours 
earlier than they need have done, in order (as they said) 
not to miss the show, cheered them on with the wildest en- 
thusiasm. 

"Look at those beggars," shouted one man as the cavalry 



112 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

swept past ; "that's the way to take a village. No blighted 
bombs for them, and hell for leather all the way !" 

It .was a difficult operation, this taking of Equancourt, 
and was carried out in the best cavalry style according to 
the old traditions. The village and a little wood in the 
front of it were held by Cxermans with machine-guns, and 
another village to the right named Sorel was defended in 
the same way, and commanded the field of fire before 
Equancourt. The cavalry had two spurs of ground in front 
of them divided by two narrow gullies, or re-entrants. One 
gully ran straight to the village of Equancourt, but was di- 
rectly in front of the German machine-gun emplacements. 
The other gully was to the right, and it was through this 
that the cavalry rode, sweeping round in a curve to Equan- 
court. Before their charge of two parties, a third party 
was posted on the left on rising ground, and swept the 
wood below Equancourt with machine-gun fire, and a 
smaller body of cavalry to the right occupied the attention 
of the enemy in Sorel in the same way. Then the two 
attacking parties were launched, and rode hard at a pace 
of twenty-three miles an hour. 

The enemy did not stand. After a few bursts of ma- 
chine-gun fire, which only hit a few of our mounted men, 
they fled behind the shelter of a railway embankment be- 
yond the village, and most of them escaped. 

All this is an interlude between greater and grimmer 
things. We have not yet come to the period of real open 
warfare, but have only passed over a wide belt of No 
Man's Lacd : and the fantasy of cavalry skirmishes and 
wandering Germans and civilians greeting us with out- 
stretched hands from ruined villages will soon be closed 
by the wire and walls of the Hindenburg line, where once 
again the old fortress and siege warfare will begin, unless 
we have the luck to turn it or break through before the 
Siegfried divisions have finished their fortifications. 



PART III 
THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 



Arras and the Vimy Ridge 

April 9 
To-day at dawn our armies began a battle which, if Fate 
has any kindness for the world, may be the beginning of 
the last great battles of the war. Our troops attacked on a 
wide front including the Vimy Ridge — that grim hill wh^ph 
dominates the plain of Douai and the coalfields of Lens — 
and the German positions around Arras. In spite of bad 
fortune in the weather at the beginning of the day, so bad 
that there was no visibility for the airmen, and our men 
had to struggle forward in a heavy rain-storm, the first 
attacks have been successful, and the enemy has lost much 
ground, falling back in retreat to strong rear-guard lines 
where he is now fighting desperately. 

The line of our attack covers a front of some twelve 
miles southwards from Givenchy-en-Gohelle, and is a 
sledge-hammer blow threatening to break the northern end 
of the Hindenburg line, already menaced round St.-Quentin. 
As soon as the enemy was forced to retreat from the 
country east of Bapaume and Peronne, in order to escape a 
decisive blow on that line, he hurried up divisions and 
guns northwards to counter our attack there, while he pre- 
pared a new line of defence known as the Wotan line, as 
the southern part of the Hindenburg line, which joins it, 
is known as the Siegfried position, after two great heroes 
of old German mythology. He hoped to escape there be- 

"3 



114 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

fore our new attack was ready, but we have been too quick 
for him, and his own plans were frustrated. So to-day be- 
gan another titanic conflict which the world will hold its 
breath to watch, because of all that hangs upon it. 

I have seen the fury of this beginning, and all the sky 
on fire with it, the most tragic and frightful sight that men 
have ever seen, with an infernal splendour beyond words 
to tell. The bombardment which went before the infantry 
assault lasted for several days, and reached a great height 
yesterday, when coming from the south I saw it for the 
first time. I went up in darkness long before light broke 
to-day to watch the opening of the battle. It was very cold, 
with a sharp wind blowing from the south-east and rain- 
squalls. The roads were quiet until I drew near to Arras, 
and then onwards there was the traffic of marching men 
going up to the fighting-lines, and of their transport col- 
umns, and of many ambulances. In darkness there were 
hundreds of little red lights, the glow of cigarette ends. 
Every now and then one of the men would strike a match, 
holding it in the hollow of his hands and bending his head 
to it, so that his face was illumined — one of our English 
faces, clear-cut and strong. The wind blew sparks from 
cigarette ends like fireflies. Outside one camp a battalion 
was marching away, a regiment of shadow-forms, and on 
the bank above them the band was playing them out with 
fifes and drums, such a merry little tune, so whimsical and 
yet so sad also in the heart of it, as it came trilling out of 
darkness. On each side of me as I passed by men were 
deeply mgssed, and they were whistling and singing and 
calling out to each other. Away before them were the 
fires of death, to which they were going very steadily, 
with a tune on their lips, carrying their rifles and shovels 
and iron rations, while the rain played a tattoo on their 
steel hats. 

I went to a place a little outside Arras on the west side. 
It was not quite dark, because there was a kind of suf- 
fused light from the hidden moon, so that I could see the 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 115 

black mass of the cathedral city, the storm-centre of this 
battle, and away behind me to the left the tall, broken 
towers of Mont-St.-Eloi, white and ghostly looking, across 
to the Vimy Ridge. The bombardment was now in full 
blast. It was a beautiful and devilish thing, and the beauty 
of it and not the evil of it put a spell upon one's senses. All 
our batteries, too many to count, were firing, and thou- 
sands of gun-flashes were winking and blinking from the 
hollows and hiding-places, and all their shells were rush- 
ing through the sky as though flocks of great birds were 
in flight, and all were bursting over German positions, with 
long flames which rent the darkness and waved sword- 
blades of quivering light along the ridges. The earth 
opened, and pools of red fire gushed out. Star-shells burst 
magnificently, pouring down golden rain. Mines exploded 
east and west of Arras, and in a wide sweep from Vimy 
Ridge to Blangy southwards, and voluminous clouds, all 
bright with a glory of infernal fire, rolled up to the sky. 
The wind blew strongly across, beating back the noise of 
guns, but the air was all filled with the deep roar and the 
slamming knocks of single heavies and the drum-fire of 
field-guns. 

The first attack was at 5.30. Ofiicers were looking at 
their wrist-watches as on a day in July last year. The 
earth lightened. In rank grass, looking white and old, 
scrubs of barbed wire were black on it. A few minutes be- 
fore 5.30 the guns almost ceased fire, so that there was a 
strange, solemn hush. We waited, and pulses beat faster 
than second-hands. "They're away," said a voice by my 
side. The bombardment broke out again with new and 
enormous effects of fire and sound. The enemy was shell- 
ing Arras heavily, and black shrapnel and high explosives 
came over from his lines. But our gun-fire was twenty 
times as great. Around the whole sweep of his lines green 
lights rose. They were signals of distress, and his men 
were calling for help. It was dawn now, but clouded and 
storm-swept. A few airmen came out with the wind tear- 



116 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ing at their wings, but they could see nothing in the mist 
and driven rain. I went down to the outer ramparts of 
Arras. The eastern suburb of Blangy was already in our 
hands. On the higher ground beyond our men were fight- 
ing forward. I saw two waves of infantry advancing 
against the enemy's trenches, preceded by our barrage of 
field-guns. They went in a slow, leisurely way, not hurried, 
though the enemy's shrapnel was searching for them. 

"Grand fellows," said an officer lying next to me on 
the wet slope. "Oh, topping!" 

Fifteen minutes afterwards groups of men came back. 
They were British wounded and German prisoners. They 
were met on the roadside by medical officers, who patched 
them up there and then before they were taken to the field- 
hospitals in ambulances. From these men, hit by shrapnel 
and machine-gun bullets, I heard the first news of progress. 
They were bloody and exhausted, but claimed success. 

"We did fine," said one of them. "We were through 
the fourth lines before I was knocked out." 

"Not many Germans in the first trenches," said another, 
"and no real trenches either, after our shelling. We had 
knocked their dug-outs out, and their dead were lying thick, 
and living ones put their hands up." 

There were Tanks in action. Some of the men had seen 
them crawling forward over the open country, and then had 
lost sight of them. In the night the enemy had with- 
drawn all but his rear-guard posts to the trenches farther 
back, where he resisted fiercely with incessant machine-gun 
fire. The- enemy's trench system south of Arras was 
enormously strong, but our bombardment had pounded it, 
and our men went through to the reserve support trench, 
and then on to the chain of posts in front of the Hangest 
Trench, which was strongly held, and after heavy fighting 
with bombs and bayonets to the Observatory Ridge, from 
which for two years and a half the enemy has looked down, 
directing the fire of his batteries against the French and 
British positions. Our storm troops in this part of the 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 117 

line were all men of the old English county regiments — 
Norfolks, Suffolks, Essex, Berkshires, Sussex, Middlesex, 
Queen's, Buffs, and Royal West Kents of the 12th Divi- 
sion. There was fierce fighting in Tilloy, to the south of 
Arras, by the Suffolks, Shropshire Light Infantry, and 
Royal Welsh Fusiliers of the 3rd Division, and afterwards 
they were held up by machine-gun fire from two formidable 
positions called the "Harp" and "Telegraph Hill," the 
former being a fortress of trenches shaped like an Irish 
harp, the latter rising to a high mound. These were taken 
by English troops and the Scots of the 15th Division, with 
the help of Tanks, which advanced upon them in their 
leisurely way, climbed up banks and over parapets, sitting 
for a while to rest and then waddling forward again, shak- 
ing machine-gun bullets from steel flanks, and pouring 
deadly fire into the enemy's positions, and so mastering 
the ground. 

North of the Scarpe (north-east of Arras) the whole 
system of trenches was taken; and north again, along the 
Vimy Ridge, the Canadians and Highlanders of the 51st 
Division achieved a heroic success by gaining this high 
dominating ground, which was the scene of some of the 
fiercest French battles in the first part of the war, and which 
is a great wall defending Douai. It was reckoned up to 
noon to-day that over 3000 prisoners had been taken. They 
are streaming down to prisoners' camps, and to our men 
who pass them on the roads they are the best proofs of a 
victorious day. 

Those of us who knew what would happen to-day — the 
beginning of another series of battles greater perhaps than 
the struggle of the Somme — found ourselves yesterday filled 
with a tense, restless emotion. Some of us smiled with a 
kind of tragic irony, because it was Easter Sunday. In 
little villages behind the battle lines the bells of French 
churches were ringing glady because the Lord had risen; 
and on the altar steps priests were reciting the old words 



118 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

of faith, "Resurrexi et adhuc tecum sum! Alleluia!" The 
earth was glad yesterday. For the first time this year the 
sun had a touch of warmth in it — though patches of snow 
still stayed white under the shelter of the banks — and the 
sky was blue, and the light glinted on wet tree-trunks and 
in the furrows of the new-ploughed earth. As I went up 
the road to the battle lines I passed a battalion of our men 
— the men who are fighting to-day — standing in a hollow 
square with bowed heads, while the chaplain conducted the 
Easter service. It was Easter Sunday, but no truce of God. 
I went to a field outside Arras, and looked into the ruins 
of the cathedral city. The cathedral itself stood clear in 
the sunlight, with a deep black shadow where its roof and 
aisles had been. Beyond was a ragged pinnacle of stone — 
the once glorious town hall and a French barracks — and 
all the broken streets going out to the Cambrai road. It 
was hell in Arras, though Easter Sunday. The enemy was 
flinging high explosives into the city, and clouds of shrap- 
nel burst above, black and green. All around the country, 
too, his shells were exploding in a scattered, aimless way, 
and from our side there was a heavy bombardment all 
along the Vimy Ridge, above Neuville-St.-Vaast, and sweep- 
ing round above St.-Nicholas and Blangy, two suburbs of 
Arras, and then south-west of the city on the ridge above 
the road to Cambrai. It was one continuous roar of death, 
and all the batteries were firing steadily. I watched our 
shells burst, and some of them were monstrous, raising 
great lingering clouds above the German lines. 

There was one figure in this landscape of war who made 
some officers about me laugh. He was a French plough- 
man who upholds the tradition of war. Zola saw him in 
1870, and I have seen him on the edge of the other bat- 
tlefields; and here he was again driving a pair of sturdy 
horses and his plough across the sloping field — not a fur- 
long away from the town where the German shells were 
raising rosy clouds of brick-dust. So he gave praise to the 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 119 

Lord on Easter morning, and prepared the harvests which 
shall be gathered after the war. 

All behind the front of battle was a great traffic, and all 
that modern warfare means in the organization and prepa- 
ration of an enormous operation was here in movement. I 
had just come from our outpost lines down south from the 
silence of that great desert which the enemy has left in the 
wake of his retreat, east of Bapaume and Peronne, and 
from that open warfare with village fighting, where small 
bodies of our infantry and cavalry have been clearing the 
countryside of rear-guard posts. Here, round about Ar- 
ras, was the concentration for the old form of battle at- 
tack upon entrenched positions, fortified hills and strong 
natural fortresses, defended by massed guns as before the 
battles of the Somme. For miles on the way to the front 
were great camps, great stores, and restless activity every- 
where. Supply columns of food for men and guns moved 
forward in an endless tide. Transport mules passed in 
long trails. Field-batteries went up to add to the mass of 
metal ready to pour fire upon the German lines. It was 
a vast circus of the world's great war, and everything that 
belongs to the machinery of killing streamed on and on. 
Columns of ambulances for the rescue, and not for that 
other side of the business, came in procession, followed 
by an army of stretcher-bearers, more than I have ever 
seen before, marching cheerily as though in a pageant. In 
some of the ambulances were Army nurses, and men march- 
ing on the roads waved their hands to them, and they 
laughed and waved back. In the fields by the roadsides 
men were resting, lying on the wet earth, between two 
spells of a long march or encamped in rest, the same kind 
of men whom I saw on July i of last year, some of them 
the same men — our boys, clean-shaven, grey-eyed, so 
young-looking, so splendid to see. Some of them sat be- 
tween their stacked rifles writing letters home. And the 
tide of traffic passed them and flowed on to the edge of 
the battlefields, where to-day they are fighting. 



120 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

April io 
The enemy has lost already nearly 10,000 prisoners and 
more than half a hundred guns, and in dead and wounded 
his losses are great. He is in retreat south of the Vimy 
Ridge to defensive lines farther back, and as he goes our 
guns are smashing him along the roads. During the night 
the Canadians gained the last point, called Hill 145, on the 
Vimy Ridge, where the Germans held out in a pocket with 
machine-guns, and this morning the whole of that high 
ridge, which dominates the plains to Douai, is in our hands, 
so that there is removed from our path the high barrier for 
which the French and ourselves have fought through bloody 
years. Yesterday before daylight and afterwards I saw 
this ridge of Vimy all on fire with the light of great gun- 
fire. The enemy was there in strength, and his guns were 
answering ours with a heavy barrage of high explosives. 
This morning the scene was changed as by a miracle. Snow 
was falling, blown gustily across the battlefields, and 
powdering the capes and helmets of our men as they rode 
or marched forward to the front. But presently sunlight 
broke through the storm-clouds and flooded all the country- 
side by Neuville-St.-Vaast and Thelus and La Folic Farm, 
up to the crest of the ridge, where the Canadians and High- 
landers of the 51st Division had just fought their way 
with such high valour. Our batteries were firing frorri 
many hiding-places, revealed by short, sharp flashes of 
light, but few answering shells came back, and the ridge 
itself, patched with snowdrift, was quiet as any hill of 
peace. It was astounding to think that not a single Ger- 
man stayed up there out of all those who had held it yester- 
day, unless some poor wounded devils still cower in the 
deep tunnels which pierce the hill-side. It was almost un- 
believable to me, who have known the evil of this high 
ridge month after month and year after year, and the 
deadly menace which lurked about its lower slopes. Yet I 
saw proof below, where all Germans who had been there 
at dawn yesterday, thousands of them, were down in our 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 121 

lines, drawn up in battalions, marshalling themselves, grin- 
ning at the fate which had come to them and spared their 
lives. 

The Canadian attack yesterday was astoundingly success- 
ful, and carried out by high-spirited men, the victors of 
Courcelette in the battles of the Somme, who had before the 
advance an utter and joyous confidence of victory. On their 
right were the Highland Brigades of the 51st Division who 
fought at Beaumont-Hamel, and who shared the honour 
of that day with the Canadians, taking as many prisoners 
and gaining a great part of the ridge. They went away 
at dawn, through the mud and rain which made scarecrows 
of them. They followed close and warily to the barrage 
of our guns, the most stupendous line of fire ever seen, and 
by 6.30 they had taken their first objectives, which included 
the whole front-line system of German trenches above 
Neuville-St.-Vaast, by La Folie Farm and La Folie Wood, 
and up by Thelus, where they met with fierce resistance. 
The German garrisons were for the most part in long, deep 
tunnels, pierced through the hill as assembly ditches. There 
were hundreds of them in Prinz Arnault Tunnel, and hun- 
dreds more in Great Volker Tunnel, but as the Canadians 
and Scots surged up to them with wave after wave of 
bayonets German soldiers streamed out and came running 
forward with hands up. They were eager to surrender, 
and their great desire was to get down from Vimy Ridge 
and the barrage of their own guns. That barrage fell 
heavily and fiercely upon the Turco Trench, but too late to 
do much damage to our men, who had already gone be- 
yond it. The Canadian casualties on the morning of at- 
tack were not heavy in comparison with the expected losses, 
though, God knows, heavy enough, but the German prison- 
ers were glad to pay for the gift of life by carrying our 
wounded back. The eagerness of these men was pitiful, 
and now and then grotesque. At least the Canadian escorts 
found good laughing matter in the enormous numbers of 
men they had to guard and in the way the prisoners them- 



122 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

selves directed the latest comers to barbed-wire enclosures, 
and with deep satisfaction acted as masters of the cere- 
mony to their own captivity. I have never seen such cheer- 
ful prisoners, although for the most part they were with- 
out overcoats and in a cold blizzard of snow. They were 
joking with each other, and in high good humour, because 
life with all its hardships was dear to them, and they had 
the luck of life. They were of all sizes and ages and types. 
I saw elderly, whiskered men with big spectacles, belong- 
ing to the professor tribe, and young lads who ought to 
have been in German high schools. Some of their faces 
looked very wizened and small beneath their great shrapnel 
helmets. Many of them looked ill and starved, but others 
were tall, stout, hefty fellows, who should have made good 
fighting men if they had any stomach for the job. There 
were many officers standing apart. Canadians took over 
two hundred of them, among whom were several forward 
observing officers, very bad tempered with their luck, be- 
cause the men had not told them they were going to bolt 
and had left them in front positions. All officers were 
disconcerted because of the cheerfulness of the men at be- 
ing taken. I talked with a few of them. They told me of 
the horrors of living under our bombardment. Some of 
them had been without food for four days, because our 
gun-fire had boxed them in. 

"When do you think the war will end?" I asked one of 
them. 

"When the English are in Berlin," he answered, and I 
think he meant that that would be a long time. 

Another officer said, "In two months," and gave no rea- 
son for his certainty. 

"What about America?" I asked one of them. He 
shrugged his shoulders, and said, "It is bad for us, very 
bad; but, after all, America can't send an army across the 
ocean." 

At this statement Canadian soldiers standing around 
laughed loudly, and said, "Don't you believe it, old sport. 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 123 

We have come along to fight you, and the Yankees will do 
the same.'" 

By three o'clock in the afternoon the Canadians and 
the Highland Brigades had gained the whole of the ridge 
except the high strong post on the left of Hill 145, cap- 
tured during the night. Our gun-fire had helped them by 
breaking down all the wire, even round Heroes' Wood and 
Count's Wood, where it was very thick and strong. Thelus 
was wiped utterly off the map. This morning Canadian 
patrols pushed in a snow-storm through Farbus Wood, and 
established outposts on the railway embankment. Some of 
the bravest work was done by forward observing officers, 
who climbed to the top of Vimy Ridge as soon as it was 
captured, and through the heavy fire barrages reported 
back to the artillery all the movements seen by them in 
the country below. 

In spite of the wild day, our flying men were riding the 
storm and signalling to the gunners who were rushing up 
their field-guns. "Our 60-pounders," said a Canadian Of- 
ficer, "had the day of their lives." They found many 
targets. There were trains moving in Vimy village and 
they hit them. There were troops massing on sloping 
ground and they were shattered. There were guns and 
limber on the move, and men and horses were killed." 

Above all the prisoners taken yesterday by the English, 
Scottish, and Canadian troops the enemy's losses were 
frightful, and the scenes behind his lines must have been 
hideous in slaughter and terror. On the right of Arras 
there was hard and costly fighting in Blangy and Tilloy 
and onwards to Feuchy. On this side the Germans fought 
most fiercely, and the Shropshires, Suffolks, Royal Fusi- 
liers, and Welsh Fusiliers of the 3rd Division were held up 
near Feuchy Chapel and other strong points until our gun- 
fire knocked out these works and made way for them. 
Fifty-four guns were taken here on the east side of Arras, 
and to-day the pursuit of the beaten enemy continues. 



lU FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 



Londoners Through the German Lines 

The Londoners* attack at dawn was one of the splendid 
episodes of the battle. They went through the German 
lines in long waves, and streamed forward like a living tide, 
very quick and very far, taking a thousand prisoners on 
their way through Neuville-Vitasse and Mercatel. Later 
in the day they were held up in their right flank by enfilade 
fire, as the troops on their right were in difficulties against 
uncut wire and machine-guns, and from that time onwards 
the London men of the 56th Division had perilous hours 
and hard, costly fighting. They were forced to extend 
beyond their line on the left to join up the gap between 
themselves and the troops to their north, and to work down 
with bombing parties on the right to gain ground in which 
the Germans were holding out desperately and inflicting 
many casualties on our men. In the centre the 56th Divi- 
sion was ordered to attack fortified villages from which 
machine-gun bullets swept the ground and where our as- 
sault was checked by stout belts of wire with unbroken 
strands. It was in those hours on April 9 and 10 that many 
young London men showed the highest qualities of spirit, 
risking death, and worse than death, with most desperate 
gallantry. 

A young subaltern of the Middlesex Regiment saw those 
wire traps in the centre of Neuville-Vitasse, and led the 
way to them with a party of bombers and Lewis-gunners, 
smashed them up, and jumped on the machine-guns be- 
yond. It opened the gate to all the other Londoners — 
Kensingtons, Rangers, and London Scottish — who swept 
through this village and beyond. Many officers fell, but 
there was always some one to take command and lead the 
men — a sergeant with a cool head, a second lieutenant with 
a flame in his eyes. 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 125 

It was a boy of nineteen who took command of one com- 
pany of the Middlesex Regiment when he was the only one 
to lead. He had never been under fire before, and had never 
seen all this blood and horror. He was a slip of a fellow, 
who had been spelling out fairy-tales ten years ago, which 
is not far back in history. Now, he led a company of 
fighting men, who followed him as a great captain all 
through that day's battle, and from one German line to 
another, and from one village to another, until all the 
ground had been gained according to the first plan. This 
gallant boy was afterwards reported missing, and his com- 
rades believe that he was killed. 

It was a battle of second lieutenants of London, owing 
to the heavy casualties of commanding officers. One of 
them was wounded in the head early in the day, but led his 
men until hours later he fell and fainted. Another young 
officer went out with three men in the darkness, when the 
infantry was held up by serious obstacles, and under heavy 
fire brought back information which saved many lives and 
enabled the whole line to advance. 

There was a second lieutenant of the London Rangers 
who behaved with a quick decision and daring which seemed 
inspired by something more than sound judgment. The 
enemy was holding out in a trench and sweeping men down 
with that death-rattle of bullets which is the worst thing 
in all this fighting. In front of them was imcut wire, 
which is always a trap for men. Our London lieutenant 
did not go straight ahead. He flung his platoon round to 
the flank, smashed through the wire here, and sprang at 
the German gun-team with a revolver in one hand and a 
bomb in the other. The whole team was destroyed except 
one man, who fell wounded, and above those dead bodies 
the second lieutenant waved his revolver to his men and 
said, "Let's get on." 

The London men went on for nine days, which is like 
ninety years on such a battlefield. They went on until 
they were checked and held by the enemy, who had time to 



126 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

rush up strong reserves and bring up new weight of guns. 
But they smashed through the Cojeul Switch and broke the 
Hindenburg Hne at Heninel. 

Shell-fire increased hour by hour. From many hidden 
places machine-guns poured bullets across the ground. Ger- 
man snipers lay out in shell-holes picking off our men. This 
sniping was intolerable, and a second lieutenant and 
sergeant crawled out into No Man's Land to deal with it. 
They dragged three snipers out of one hole, and searched 
others and helped to check this hidden fire. One London 
rifleman went forward to kill a machine-gun with its hide- 
ous tat-tat-tat. It was a bolder thing than St. George's at- 
tack on the dragon, which was a harmless beast compared 
with this spitfire devil. The rifleman armed himself with 
a Lewis gun, carried at his hip, and fired so coolly that he 
scattered the German team and captured the gun. 

All through those nine days, and afterwards in a second 
spell worse than those, the London men lived under great 
fire, those that had the luck to live, and though their 
nerves were all frayed with the strain of it, and they suf- 
fered great agonies and great losses, they never lost courage 
and kept their pride^ — London Pride. 

One medical officer's orderly never tired of searching for 
stricken men, and seemed to have some magic about him, 
with shells bursting everywhere round about his steps and 
bullets spitting on each side of him. He organized stretcher- 
bearer parties, gave some of his own magic to them, and 
saved many lives. A captain of the R.A.M.C. went out 
under heavy fire and dressed the wounds of men lying their 
in agony and brought them back alive. A London private 
remained out looking after the wounded in an exposed 
place, and in his spare time saved other men attacked by 
small parties of Germans, by kilHng nine of them and tak- 
ing one man prisoner. Another second lieutenant, one of 
those boys who have poured out the blood of youth upon 
these battlefields, took two Vickers guns with their teams 
through two barrages — only those who have seen a barrage 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 127 

can know the meaning of that — and by great skill and cun- 
ning brought his men through without a single casualty, so 
that the infantry followed with high hearts. 

Out of a burning billet and out of an exploding ammuni- 
tion dump, a transport driver brought out some charges 
urgently needed for the battle. A man who entered a cage 
of tigers to draw their teeth would not want greater nerve 
than this. 

When the blinds were drawn across the windows of many 
little London houses, when dusk crept into Piccadilly Circus 
and shadows darkened down the Strand, when the great 
old soul of London slept a while in the night, these boys 
who had gone out from her streets were fighting, and are 
fighting still, in the greatest battle of the world, and as 
they lie awake in a ditch, or wounded in a shell-hole, their 
spirit travels home again, through the old swirl of traffic, 
to quiet houses where already, perhaps, there is the scent 
of may-blossom, 

3? 

The Struggle Round Monchy 

April ii 
This morning our men advanced upon the villages of 
Monchy-le-Preux and La Bergere, on each side of the Cam- 
brai road, beyond the ruins of Tilloy-les-Mofflaines, and oc- 
cupied them after heavy fighting. British cavalry were first 
into Monchy, riding through a storm of shrapnel, and 
heavily bombarded in the village so that many of their 
horses were killed and many men wounded. 

I saw the whole picture of this fighting to-day, and all 
the spirit and drama of it. It was a wonderful scene, not 
without terror, and our men passed through it alert and 
watchful to the menace about them. Going out beyond Ar- 
ras through suburbs which were in German hands until 
Monday last — they had scribbled their names and regi- 
ments on broken walls of strafed houses, and men of Eng- 
lish battalions who captured them had scrawled their own 



128 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

names above these other signatures — I came to the Ger- 
man barbed wire which had protected the enemy's lines, 
and then into three systems of trenches which had been the 
objectives of our men on the morning when the battle of 
Arras began. Here was Hangest Trench, in which the 
enemy had made his chief resistance, and Holt Redoubt 
and Horn Redoubt, where his machine-guns had checked 
us, and a high point on the road to Tilloy, to which a Tank 
had crawled after a lone journey out of Arras to sweep this 
place with machine-gun fire, so that our men could get on 
to the village. It is no wonder that the Germans lost 
this ground, and that those who remained alive in their 
dug-outs surrendered quickly, as soon as our men were 
about them. The effect of our bombardment was ghastly. 
It had ploughed all this country with great shell-craters, 
torn fields of barbed wire to a few tattered strands, and 
smashed in all the trenches to shapeless ditches. 

Tilloy still had parts of houses standing, bits of white 
wall having no relation to the wild rubbish-heaps around. 
The Germans had torn up the rails to make barricades, and 
had used farm carts, ploughs, and brick-heaps as cover. 
But they could have given no protection when the sky 
rained fire and thunderbolts. Dead bodies lay about in 
every shape and shapelessness of death. I passed into 
Devil's Wood — well named, because here there had been 
hellish torture of men — and so on to Observatory Ridge 
and ground from which, not far away, I looked into 
Monchy and across the battlefields where our men were 
fighting then. The enemy was firing heavy shells. They 
fellj^hick about Monchy village and on the other side of 
the Cambrai road, roaring horribly as they came and fling- 
ing up volumes of black earth and mud. The enemy's gun- 
ners were scattering other shells about, but in an aimless 
way, so that they found no real target, though they were 
frightening, especially when some of these crumps spattered 
one with mud. 

Flights of British aeroplanes were on the wing, and Ger- 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 129 

man aeroplanes tried to fight their way over our lines. I 
saw several with the swish of machine-gun bullets and the 
high whining shells of British "Archies" about them. I 
have never before seen so great a conflict in the skies. It 
was a battle up there, and as far as I could see we gained 
a mastery over the enemy's machines, though some of them 
were very bold. 

On the earth it was open warfare of the old kind, for we 
were beyond the trenches and our men were moving across 
the fields without cover. Some of our machine-gunners 
were serving their weapons from shell-holes, and the only 
protection of the headquarters staff of the cavalry was a 
shallow ditch in the centre of the battlefield sheltered by a 
few planks, quite useless against shell-fire, but keeping off 
the snow, which fell in heavy wet flakes. There the officers 
sat in the ditch, shoulder to shoulder, studying their maps 
and directing the action while reports were called down the 
funnel of a chimney by an officer who had been out on 
reconnaissance. 

"It is villainously unhealthy round here," said this of- 
ficer, who spoke to me after he had given his news to the 
cavalry general. He looked across to Monchy, and said, 
"Old Fritz is putting up a stiff fight." At that'moment a 
German crump fell close, and we did not continue the con- 
versation. 

Across the battlefield came stretcher-bearers, carrying the 
wounded shoulder high, and the lightly wounded men 
walked back from Monchy and Guemappe very slowly, 
with that dragging gait which is bad to see. I spoke to a 
wounded officer and asked him how things were going. 

"Pretty hot," he said, and then shivered and said, "but 
now I feel cold as ice." 

Snow fell all through the afternoon, covering the litter 
of battle and the bodies of all our dead boys, giving a 
white beauty even to the ugly ruins of Tilloy and chang- 
ing the Devil's Wood by enchantment to a kind of dream- 
picture. Through this driving snow our guns fired cease- 



130 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

lessly, and I saw all their flashes through the storm, and 
their din was enormous. Away in front of me stretched 
the road to Cambrai, the high road of our advance. It 
seemed so easy to walk down there — but if I had gone 
farther I should not have come back. 

In a hundred years not all the details of this battle will 
be told, for to each man in all the thousands who are 
fighting there is a great adventure, and they are filled with 
sensations stronger than drink can give, so that it wiU 
seem a wild dream — a dream red as flame and white as 
snow. 

For this amazing battle, which is bringing to us tides of 
prisoners and many batteries of guns, is being fought on 
spring days heavy with snow, as grim as sternest winter 
except when in odd half -hours the sun breaks through 
the storm-clouds and gives a magic beauty to all this white- 
ness of the battlefields and to trees furred with bars of 
ermine and to all the lace work of twigs ready for green 
birth. Now as I write there is no sun, but a darkness 
through which heavy flakes are falling. Our soldiers are 
fighting through it to the east of Arras, and their steel 
helmets and tunics and leather jerkins are all white as the 
country through which they are forcing back the enemy. 

While the battle was raging on the Vimy heights Eng- 
lish and Scottish troops of the 15th, 12th, and 3rd Divi- 
sions were fighting equally fiercely, with more trouble to 
meet round about Arras. Beyond the facts I have already 
written there are others that must be recorded quickly, 
before quick history runs away from them. 

Some day a man must give a great picture of the night 
in Arras before the battle, and I know one man who could 
do so — a great hunter of wild beasts, with a monocle that 
quells the human soul and a very "parfit gentil knight," 
whose pen is as pointed as his lance. He spent the night 
in a tunnel of Arras before getting into a sap in No Man's 
Land before the dawn, where he was with a "movie man," 
an official photographer (both as gallant as you will find 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 131 

in the Army), and a machine-gunner ready for action. 
Thousands of other men spent the night before the battle 
'n the great tunnels, centuries old, that run out of Arras 
to the country beyond, by Blangy and St.-Sauveur. The 
enemy poured shells into the city, which I watched that 
night before the dawn from the ramparts outside, but in 
the morning they came up from those subterranean gal- 
leries and for a little while no more shells fell in Arras, for 
the German gunners were busy with other work, and were 
in haste to get away. The fighting was very fierce round 
Blangy, the suburb of Arras, where the enemy was in the 
broken ruins of the houses and behind garden walls 
strongly barricaded with piled sand-bags. But our men 
smashed their way through and on. Troops of those old 
English regiments were checked a while at strong German 
works known as the Horn, Holt, Hamel, and Hangest 
positions, and at another strong point called the Church 
Work. It was at these places that the Tanks did well on 
a day when they had hard going because of slime and 
mud, and after a journey of over three miles from their 
starting-point knocked out the German machine-guns, and 
so let the infantry get on. Higher north at a point known 
as Railway Triangle, east-south-east of Arras, where rail- 
way lines join, Gordons, Argylls, Seaforths, and Camerons 
of the 15th Division were held back by machine-gun fire. 
The enemy's works had not been destroyed by our bom- 
bardment, and our barrage had swept ahead of the troops. 
News of the trouble was sent back, and presently back 
crept the barrage of our shell-fire, coming perilously close 
to the Scottish troops, but not too close. With marvel- 
lous accuracy the gunners found the target of the Triangle 
and swept it with shell-fire so that its defences were de- 
stroyed. The Scots surged forward, over the chaos of 
broken timber and barricades, and struggled forward again 
to their goal, which brought them to Feuchy Well, and 
to-day much farther. A Tank helped them at Feuchy 
Chapel, cheered by the Scots as it came into action scorn- 



132 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ing machine-gun bullets. The Harp was another strong 
point of the enemy's which caused difficulty to King's Own 
Liverpools, the Shropshire Light Infantry, Royal Fusiliers, 
East Yorks, Scottish Fusiliers, and Royal Scots, as I have 
already told, on the first day of battle, and another Tank 
came up, in its queer, slow way, and the gallant men inside 
served their guns like a Dreadnought, and so ended the 
business on that oval-shaped stronghold. 

So English and Scottish troops pressed on and gathered 
up thousands of prisoners. "So tame," said one of our men, 
"that they ate out of our hands." So ready to surrender 
that a brigadier and his staff who were captured with them 
were angry and ashamed of men taken in great numbers 
without a single wounded man among them. Fifty- four 
guns were captured on this eastern side of Arras, and six 
were howitzers, and two of these big beasts were taken 
by cavalry working with the troops. Some of the gun- 
ners had never left their pits after our bombardment be- 
came intense four days before, and were suffering from 
hunger and thirst. Trench-mortars and machine-guns lay 
everywhere about, in scores, smashed, buried, flung about 
by the ferocity of our shell-fire. German officers wearing 
Iron Crosses wept when they surrendered. It was their 
day of unbelievable tragedy. A queer thing happened to 
some German transport men. They were sent out from 
Douai to Fampoux. They did not know they were going 
into the battle zone. They drove along until suddenly 
they saw British soldiers swarming about them. Six hours 
after their start from Douai they were eating bully-beef on 
our side of the lines, and while they munched could not 
believe their own senses. Our troops treated them with the 
greatest good humour, throwing chocolates and cigarettes 
into their enclosures and crowding round to speak to men 
who knew the English tongue. There seemed no kind of 
hatred between these men. There was none after the battle 
had been fought, for in our British way we cannot harbour 
hate for beaten enemies when the individuals are there, 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 133 

broken and in our hands. Yet a little farther away the 
fighting was fierce, and there was no mercy on either side. 

April 12 

In spite of the enemy's hard resistance and the abom- 
inable weather conditions which cause our troops great 
hardships, we are making steady progress towards the Ger- 
man defensive positions along the Hindenburg line. 

North of Vimy Ridge this morning his lines were pierced 
by a new attack, delivered with great force above Givenchy ; 
and south of the village of Wancourt, below Monchy-le- 
Preux, we have seized an important little hill-top. 

Monchy itself is securely in our hands this morning, 
after repeated counter-attacks yesterday and last night 
In my last dispatch I described in the briefest way how I 
went up towards Monchy yesterday across the crowded bat- 
tlefield and looked into that village, where fierce fighting 
was in progress. Then the village was still standing, hardly 
in ruins, so that I saw roofs still on the houses and un- 
broken walls, and the white chateau only a little scarred by 
shell-fire. Now it has been almost destroyed by the enemy's 
guns, and our men held it only by the most resolute cour- 
age. It is a small place that village, but yesterday, perched 
high beyond Orange Hill, it was the storm-centre of all 
this world-conflict, and the battle of Arras paused till it 
was taken. The story of the fight for it should live in his- 
tory, and is full of strange and tragic drama. 

Our cavalry — the loth Hussars, the Essex Yeomanry, 
and the Blues — helped in the capture of this high village, 
behaving with the greatest acts of sacrifice to the ideals of 
duty. I saw them going up over Observation Ridge, and 
before they reached that point ; the dash of splendid bodies 
of men riding at the gallop in a snow-storm which had cov- 
ered them with white mantles and crowned their steel hats. 
Afterwards I saw some of these men being carried back 
wounded over the battlefield, and the dead body of their 
general, on a stretcher, taken by a small party of troopers 



134 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

through the ruins of another village to his resting-place. 
Many gallant horses lay dead, and those which came back 
were caked with mud, and walked with drooping heads. 



Prison ( 

Sat/auminei 



Jeann^ d 
Ueuin 



^^LEN5^^te-=;=^fio<.; 



Aui< 

II fUericoiii^ 
UjpenchQ 



'Lotson o^\g(>ntiS'>M.^iptard 

"'" j!ourcelle_s 

Auby o 

'f/ers 






6 MILES 



I Original Line 

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exhausted in every limb. The bodies of dead boys lay all 
over these fields. 

But the cavalry rode into Monchy and captured the north 
side of the village, and the enemy fled from them. It is an 
astounding thing that two withered old Frenchwomen 
stayed in this village all through this fighting. When our 
troopers rode in these women came running forward, fright- 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 135 

ened and crying "Camarades," as though in face of the 
enemy. When our men surrounded them they were full 
of joy, and held up their withered old faces to be kissed 
by the troopers, who leaned over their saddles to give 
this greeting. Yet the battle was not over, and the shell- 
fire was most intense afterwards. 

The women told strange stories of German officers bil- 
leted in their houses. After the battle of Arras began on 
Monday these officers were very nervous; but, although the 
sound of gun-fire swept nearer they did not believe that 
the English troops would get near Monchy for some days. 
Late on Wednesday night, after preparing for the defence 
of the village, they went to bed as usual, looking exhausted 
and nerve-racked, and told the women to wake them at six 
o'clock. They were awakened by another kind of knock- 
ing at the door. English and Scottish soldiers were firing 
outside the village, and the German officers escaped in such 
a hurry that they had no time to pull down the battalion 
flag outside their gate, and our men captured it as a 
trophy. 

The attack on Monchy was made by English and Scottish 
troops — the Scots of the 15th Division — who fought very 
fiercely to clear the enemy out of Railway Triangle, where 
they were held up for three hours. Afterwards they fought 
on to Feuchy Redoubt, where they found that the whole of 
the German garrison had been buried by our bombardment, 
so that none escaped alive. At Feuchy Weir they captured 
a German electrical company, a captain and thirteen men, 
who were unarmed. The enemy shelled Feuchy village after 
our troops had passed through and gone far forward, where 
they dug in for the night under heavy shelling. Here they 
stayed all day on Tuesday close by a deep square pit, where 
four eight-inch howitzers had been abandoned to our 
cavalry. 

Meanwhile English troops of the 37th Division— War- 
wicks and Bedfords, East and West Lancashire battalions, 
and the Yorks and Lanes — were advancing on the right 



136 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and linking up for the attack on Monchy in conjunction 
with the Jocks. On the left bodies of cavalry assembled 
for a combined attack with Hotchkiss and machine guns; 
and at about five o'clock yesterday morning they swept upon 
the village. The cavalry went full split at a hard pace un- 
der heavy shrapnel-fire, and streamed into the village on 
the north side. They saw few Germans, for as they went 
in the enemy retreated to the southern side, hoping to escape 
by that way. Here they found themselves cut off by our 
infantry, the English battalions mixed up with Scots before 
the fight was over. It was hard fighting. The enemy had 
many machine-guns, and defended himself from windows 
and roofs of houses, firing down upon our men as they 
swarmed into the village streets, and fought their way into 
farmyards and courtyards. It was a house-to-house hunt, 
and about two hundred prisoners were taken, though some 
of the garrison escaped to the trench in the valley below, 
where they had machine-gun redoubts. At about eight 
o'clock yesterday morning, twenty Scots and a small party 
of English went forward from Monchy with a Tank which 
had crawled up over heavy ground and shell-craters, and 
now trained its guns upon bodies of Germans moving over 
the ridge beyond. By this time English troops had a num- 
ber of machine-guns in position for the defence of the vil- 
lage against any counter-attacks that might come. Some 
of our men had already explored the dug-outs and found 
them splendid for shelter under shell-fire. Under the 
chateau was a subterranean system furnished luxuriously 
and provided with electric light. Half an hour after the 
capture of the village some English and Scottish officers 
were drinking German beer out of German mugs. 

The peace of Monchy did not last long. At nine o'clock 
the enemy shelled the place fiercely, and for a long time, 
with 5.9 guns, as I saw myself at midday from Observation 
Ridge, which was also under fire. 

German airmen, flying above, watched our cavalry and 
infantry, and directed fire upon them. They were terrible 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 137 

hours to endure, but our men held out nobly; and when 
the enemy made his counter-attacks in the afternoon and 
evening, advancing in waves with a most determined spirit, 
they were hosed with machine-gun bullets and fell like grass 
before the scythe. Our i8-pounders also poured shell into 
them. This morning our men are in advance of the village, 
and the enemy has retreated from the trench below. The 
night was dreadful for men and beasts. Snow fell heavily, 
and was blown into deep drifts by wind as cold as ice. 
Wounded horses fell and died, and men lay in a white 
bed of snow in an agony of cold, while shells burst round 
them. As gallant as the fighting men were the supply col- 
umns, who sent up carriers through blizzard and shell-fire. 
At four o'clock in the morning a rum ration was served out, 
"And thank God for it," said one of our officers lying out 
there in a shell-hole with a shattered arm. Strange and 
ironical as it seems, the post came up also at this hour, and 
men in the middle of the battlefield, suffering the worst 
agonies of war, had letters from home which in darkness 
they could not read. 

That scene of war this morning might have been in Rus- 
sia in midwinter, instead of in France in spring-time. Snow 
was thick over the fields, four foot deep where it had 
drifted against the banks. Tents and huts behind the lines 
were covered with snow roofs, and as I went through 
Arras this poor, stricken city was all white. Stones and 
fallen masonry which have poured down from great build- 
ings of mediaeval times were overlaid with snow — until, by 
midday, it was all turned to water. Then our Army moved 
through rivers of mud, and all our splendid horses were 
pitiful to see. 

4 

The Other Side of Vimy 

April 13 
The enemy's Headquarters Staff is clearly troubled by the 
successes gained by our troops during these first days of the 



138 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

battle of Arras, and all attempts to repair the damage to his 
defensive positions upon which his future safety depends 
have been feeble and irresolute. It is certain that he de- 
sired to make a heavy counter-attack upon the northern 
edge of the Vimy Ridge. Prisoners taken yesterday all 
believed that this would be done without delay. The 5th 
Grenadiers of the Prussian Guards Reserve were hurriedly 
brought up to relieve or support the Bavarian troops, who 
had suffered frightfully, and massed in a wood, called the 
Bois d'Hirondelle, or Swallows' Wood, in order to steal 
through another little wood called Bois-en-Hache to a hill 
known by us as the Pimple, and so on to recapture Hill 145, 
taken by the Canadians on Monday night after heavy and 
costly fighting. This scheme broke down utterly. Swal- 
lows' Wood was heavily bombed by our aeroplanes, so 'that 
the massed Prussians had an ugly time there, and yester- 
day morning Canadian troops made a sudden assault upon 
the Pimple, which is a knoll slightly lower than Hill 145, 
to its right, and gained it in spite of fierce machine-gun fire 
from the garrison, who defended themselves stubbornly 
until they were killed or captured. At the same time Bois- 
en-Hache, which stands on rising ground across the little 
valley of the River Souchez, was attacked with great cour- 
age by the 24th Division, and the enemy driven out. 

It was difficult work for our infantry and gunners. The 
ground was a bog of shell-craters and mud, and there was a 
blizzard of snowflakes. The attack was made with a kind 
of instinct, backed with luck. Our men stumbled forward 
in a wake' of snow-squalls and shells, fell into shell-holes, 
climbed out again, and by some skill of their own kept 
their bombs and rifles dry. Machine-gun bullets whipped 
the ground about them. Some fell and were buried in snow- 
drifts; others went on and reached their goal, and in a 
white blizzard routed out the enemy and his machine-guns. 
It was an hour or two later that German officers, direct- 
ing operations at a distance and preparing a counter-attack 
on the Vimy Ridge, heard that the Pimple and Bois-en- 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 139 

Hache had both gone — the only places which gave observa- 
tion on the south side of Vimy and made effective any at- 
tack. Their curses must have been deep and full when 
that message came over the telephone wires. They ordered 
their batteries to fire continuously on those two places, but 
they remain ours, and our troops have endured intense 
barrage-fire without losing ground. Now we have full and 
absolute observation over Vimy Ridge to the enemy's side 
of the country reversing all the past history of this position, 
and we are making full and deadly use of it. The enemy 
still clings to Vimy village on the other side of the slopes, 
and to the line of railway on the eastern side of Farbus, but 
it is an insecure tenure, and our guns are making life hide- 
ous for the German soldiers in those places, and in the vil- 
lages farther back in the direction of Douai, and along the 
road which he is using for his transport. In the village 
of Bailleul down there are a number of batteries which the 
enemy has vainly endeavoured to withdraw. We are smoth- 
ering them with shell-fire, and he will find it difficult to get 
them away, though he can ill afford the loss of more guns. 
The enemy has been in great trouble to move his guns away 
rapidly enough owing to the dearth of transport horses. 
Even before the battle of Arras began the German batteries 
had to borrow horses from each other because there were 
not enough for all, and some of his guns have been aban- 
doned because of that lack. He cannot claim that he has 
left us only broken and useless guns. 

When the Scottish and South African troops of the 9th 
Division made the great attack on Monday last the South- 
Africans were led forward by their colonels, and took the 
first German line without a single casualty. Afterwards 
they fought against wicked machine-gun fire, but, sweeping 
all before them, and gathering in hundreds of prisoners, they 
seized a number of guns, including several 5.9 howitzers. 
A vast amount of ammunition lay about in dumps, and our 
men turned the guns about, and are using them against the 
enemy. To South-Africans who fought in Delville Wood — 



140 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

I have told the story of this tragic epic in the battle of the 
Somme — this is a triumph that pays back a little for old 
memories under German gun-fire. Their revenge is sweet 
and frightful, and they call the captured guns, those mon- 
strous five-point-nines, their trench-mortar battery. 

During this fighting our airmen have flown with extraor- 
dinary valour, and have done great work. They flew in 
snow-storms, as I saw them and marvelled, on the east side 
of Arras, and circled round for hours taking photographs 
of the enemy's positions and spotting his batteries so accu- 
rately, in spite of weather which half blinded them, that 
the German gunners who are now our prisoners say that 
they were terrorized by being made targets for our fire. 

Farther south yesterday and to-day we have made new 
breaches in the Hindenburg line by the capture of Wan- 
court and Heninel, villages south of Monchy. The fighting 
here has been most severe, and our men of the 14th and 
56th Divisions — London Rangers, Kensingtons, Middlesex, 
London Scottish, and King's Royal Rifles — lying out on 
open slopes in deep snow and under icy gales at night, 
swept by machine-gun barrages from Guemappe and with 
the sky above them flashing with shrapnel bursts and high 
explosives, have had to endure a terrible ordeal. They 
have done so with a noble spirit, and young wounded men 
to whom I spoke yesterday, in the great crypt to which 
they had crawled down from the battlefield, all spoke of 
their experience as though they would go through as much 
again in order to ensure success, without bragging, with a 
full sense of the frightful hours, but with unbroken spirit. 

"I am not out here to make a career," said a Canadian; 
"1 am out to finish an ugly job." 

It is to end this filthy war quickly that our men are fight- 
ing so grimly and with such deadly resolution. So the 
Londoners have fought their way into Wancourt and He- 
ninel, and there were great uncut belts of wire before them 
— the new wire of the Hindenburg line — and trenches and 
strong points from which machine-guns gushed out waves 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 141 

of bullets. One of the strong points hereabouts is called 
the Egg, because of its oval hummock, which was hard to 
hatch and crack, but as one of our officers said to-day, the 
Egg gave forth two hundred prisoners. 

In the fighting for the two villages the Londoners were 
held up by those great stretches of wire before them and 
were menaced most evilly by the enfilade fire of machine- 
guns from Guemappe and a high point south. Two Tanks 
came to the rescue, and did most daring things. 

"Romped up," said an officer, though I have not seen 
Tanks romping. 

Anyhow, they came up in their elephantine way, getting 
the most out of their engines and most skilfully guided by 
their young officers and crews, who were out on a great 
and perilous adventure. Climbing over rough ground, 
cleaving through snow-drifts and mud-banks with their 
steel flanks, thrusting their blunt noses above old trenches 
and sand-bag barricades, they made straight for the great 
hedges of barbed wire, and drove straight through, leav- 
ing broad lanes of broken strands. One cruised into Wan- 
court, followed from a distance by the shouts and cheers 
of the infantry. It wandered up and down the village like 
a bear on the prowl for something good to eat. It found 
human food and trampled upon machine-gun redoubts, fir- 
ing into German hiding-places. The second Tank struck 
a zigzag course for Heninel, and in that village swept down 
numbers of German soldiers, so that they fled from this 
black monster against which bombs and rifles were of no 
avail. For forty hours those two Tanks — let me be fair 
to the men inside and say those officers and crews — did 
not rest, but went about on their hunting trail, breaking 
down wire and searching out German strong points, so 
that the way would be easier for our infantry. 

Even then our men had no easy fighting. The enemy 
defended themselves stubbornly in places. Their snipers 
and bombers and machine-gunners did not yield at the first 
sight of the bayonets. While some of our troops bombed 



142 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

their way down trenches towards Wancourt, others worked 
up from the south, and at last both parties met exultantly 
behind this section of the Hindenburg line, greeting each 
other with cheers. Nearly two hundred prisoners we're 
taken hereabout, all Silesian mechanics, like those I met at 
Loos in September 191 5 — rather miserable men, with no 
heart in the war, because, as Poles, it is none of their 
making. 

It is true to say — utterly true — that all the prisoners we 
have taken this week, Prussians, Bavarians, Hamburgers, 
have lost all spirit for this fighting, hate it, loathe it as a 
devilish fate from which they have luckily escaped at last 
with life. Not one prisoner has said now that Germany 
will win on land. Their best hope is that the submarine 
campaign will force an early settlement. Their pockets are 
stuffed with letters from wives, sisters, and parents telling 
of starvation at home. It is not good literature for the 
spirit of an army. The prisoners themselves come to us 
starving. It is not because their rations in the trenches are 
insufficient. They are on short commons, but have enough 
for bodily strength. It is because our bombardment pre- 
vented all supplies from reaching them for three or four 
days. In one prisoners' enclosure, when our escort brought 
food, the men fought with each other like wild beasts, 
ravenous, and had to be separated by force and threats. 
The officers in charge of these prisoners' camps are over- 
whelmed by the masses of men. In one of them, where 
4000 were gathered, they broke the barriers. A captain and 
subaltern of ours were alone to deal with this situation ; but 
their own non-commissioned officers helped to restore order. 

The position of the enemy now is full of uncertainty for 
him. It is possible that he will try to avoid any disaster 
by falling back farther to the Drocourt — Queant line, and 
by slipping away farther north. The Hindenburg line is 
pierced, but he has established a series of switch-lines which 
will enable him to stand until our guns are ready again to 
make those positions untenable. The weather so far is 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 143 

in his favour, except that his troops are suffering as much 
as ours from cold and wet. 



5 
The Way to Lens 

April 14 
The capture of the Vimy Ridge by heroic assauh of the 
Canadians and Scots, and their endurance in holding it un- 
der the enemy's heavy fire, have been followed swiftly by 
good results. Our troops have pushed forward to-day 
through Lievin, the long and straggling suburb of Lens, 
clearing street after street of German machine-gunners 
and rear-guard posts, and our patrols are on the outskirts 
of Lens itself, the great mining town, which is famous 
in France as the capital and centre of her northern mine- 
fields. 

The retaking of this city of mine-shafts and pit-heads, 
electrical power stations, and great hive of mining activity, 
where a population of something like 40,000 people lived 
in rows of red-brick cottages, under a forest of high chim- 
neys and mountainous slag-heaps, would cause a thrill 
through all France, and be one of the greatest achievements 
of the war — a tremendous feat of arms for the British 
troops. I looked into the city to-day, down its silent and 
deserted streets, and I saw a body of our men working 
forward to get closer to it. They attacked the little wooded 
hill called the Bois de Riaumont, just to the south of the 
city, and with great cunning and courage encircled its lower 
slopes, and made their way into the street of houses be- 
hind the line of trees which is the southern way towards 
Lens. From the western side, up through Lievin, the other 
troops were advancing cautiously. The enemy was still 
there in machine-gun redoubts, which will be very trouble- 
some to our men. But they are only rear-guards, for the 
main body of the enemy has already retreated. When the 



144< FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Canadians swept over the Vimy Ridge, capturing thousands 
of prisoners, and when yesterday our 24th Division and 
Canadian troops seized the Bois-en-Hache and the Pimple, 
two small ridges or knolls below Hill 145, at the northern 
end of the Vimy Ridge, the enemy saw that his last chance 
of successful counter-attack was foiled, and at once he was 
seized with fear and prepared for instant retreat in wild 
confusion. Lens and Lievin had been stacked with his guns. 
Both towns had been fortified in a most formidable way, 
and were strongholds of massed artillery. It is certainthat 
the enemy had at least 150 guns in that great network of 
mines and pit-heads. But they were all threatened by an 
advance down the northern slopes of Vimy, and the Ca- 
nadians were not likely to stay inactive after their great 
triumph. They were also threatened by the British advance 
from the Loos battlefields by way of that great pair of black 
slag-hills called the Double Crassier, famous in this war for 
close, long, and bloody fighting, where since September 
of 191 5 our men have been only a few yards away from 
their enemy, and where I saw them last a month or two ago 
through a chink of wall in a ruined house. German staff 
officers knew their peril yesterday, and before. From 
prisoners we know that wild scenes took place in Lens, 
frantic efforts being made to get away the guns and the 
stores, to defend the line of retreat by the blowing up of 
roads, to carry out the orders for complete destruction by 
firing charges down the mine-shafts, flooding the great 
mine-galleries so that French property of enormous value 
should not be left to France, and withdrawing large bodies 
of troops down the roads under the fire of our long-range 
guns. Up to dawn yesterday the enemy in Lens hoped that 
the British pursuit would be held back by the German rear- 
guards in Vimy and Petit- Vimy villages. But that hope 
was flung from them when the Canadians swept down the 
ridge and chased the enemy out of those places on the 
lower slopes towards Douai. 

To-day, as I went towards Lens over Notre-Dame-de- 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 145 

Lorette and the valley beyond, I met a number of those men 
coming back after their victorious fighting. Amongst them 
were Nova-Scotians and young lumbermen and fishermen 
from the Far West. They came in single file, in a long 
procession through a wood — the Bois de Bouvigny — where 
once, two years ago, young Frenchmen fought with heroic 
fury and died in thousands to gain this ground, so that even 
now all this hill is strewn with their relics. 

The boys of Nova Scotia came slowly, dragging one foot 
after another in sheer exhaustion, stumbling over loose 
stones and bits of sand-bags and strands of old wire. They 
were caked with clay from head to foot. Even their faces 
had masks of clay, and they were spent and done. But 
through that whitish mud their eyes were steel-blue and 
struck fire like steel when they told me of the good victory 
they had shared in, and of the enemy's flight before them — 
all this without a touch of brag, with a fine and sweet sim- 
plicity, with a manly frankness. They have suffered tragic 
hardships in those five days since the battle of Arras be- 
gan, but there was no wail in them. When they first 
emerged from the tunnels on the morning of the great 
attack they had been swept by machine-gun fire, but by 
good luck escaped heavy casualties, though many fell. 

"Our losses were not nearly so high as we expected," said 
one lad, "but it was pretty bad all the same. Old Heine 
had an ugly habit of keeping one hand on his machine-gun 
till we were fifty paces from him, and then holding up the 
other hand and shouting 'Mercy ! Mercy !' I don't call that 
a good way of surrendering." 

The enemy surrendered in hundreds on that day, as I 
have already described, and the worst came afterwards for 
the Canadians. The enemy's barrage was heavy, but even 
that was not the worst. It was difficult to get food up, more 
difficult to get water. I met lads who had been without 
a drop for three days. One of them, a fine, hefty fellow, 
strong as a sapling, could hardly speak to me above a whis- 
per. All of them had swollen tongues and licked their dry 



146 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

lips in a parched way. Some of them had been lucky 
enough to find French wine in the German dug-outs. Then 
a wild snow-storm came. "I thought I should die," said one 
man, "when for hours I had to carry wounded through the 
snow over ground knee-deep in mud and all slippery. All 
my wounded were terribly heavy." 

But, in spite of all this, those brave, weary men went 
down the Vimy slopes at dawn yesterday with the same 
high, grim spirit to clear "Old Heine," as they call him, out 
of Vimy and Little Vimy villages. 

"They didn't wait for us," said a young Canadian officer. 
"One would think that the war would be over in a month 
by the way they ran yesterday." 

"Old Heine was scared out tDf his wits," said another 
lad. "He ran screaming from us. In a dug-out I found 
two Germans too scared even to run. They just sat and 
trembled like poor, cowed beasts. But there was one fellow 
we took who got over his fright quick, and spoke in a big 
way. He had been a waiter and spoke good English. 

" 'When will the war end ?' we asked. 

" 'Germany will fight five years,' he said, 'and then we 
will win.' 

" 'Don't you believe it, old sport,' said we, 'you're done 
in now, and it's only the mopping up we have to do.' " 

Down in the Bois-en-Hache one of our English soldiers 
of the 24th Division on the Canadians' left had a grim ad- 
venture, which he describes as "a bit of orl rite." His way 
was barred by a burly German, but not for long. After 
a tussle our lad took him inside, and there found the dead 
body of a German officer lying by the side of the table, 
which was all spread for breakfast. It was our English 
lad who ate the breakfast, keeping one eye vigilant on his 
living prisoner and not worrying about the dead one. 

There was another solditi of ours, one of the Leinsters, 
also of the 24th Division, who ate his breakfast in Angres, 
but he was in jovial company. He came across a German 
at the entrance and fought with him, but in a friendly 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 147 

kind of way. After knocking each other about they came 
to an understanding, and sat down together in a dug-out 
to a meal of German sausage, cheese, black bread, and 
French wine. They found a great deal of human nature 
in common, and were seen coming out later arm in arm, 
and in this way the Irishman brought back his prisoner. 

The colonel of the Leinsters told another queer tale of 
an Irishman in the outskirts of Lens. The colonel saw him 
after the battle of Bois-en-Hache, which was a terrible 
affair and a fine feat of arms in the mud and snow, bring- 
ing back a German horse under machine-gun fire and 
shrapnel. He was guiding this poor lean beast over fright- 
ful ground, round the edge of monstrous shell-craters, 
through broken strands of barbed wire, and across trenches 
and parapets. "What are you doing with that poor brute?" 
asked the commanding ofBcer. "Sure, sir," said the Irish- 
man, "I'm bringing the horse back for Father Malone to 
ride." The horse was in the last stages of starvation, and 
the padre weighs nineteen stone, according to the popular 
estimate of the men, who adore him, and that is part of 
the story's humour, though the Irish soldier was very seri- 
ous. It is a tribute, anyhow, to the affection of the men 
for this Irish padre — a laughing giant of a man— who is 
always out in No Man's Land when there are any of his lads 
out there, going as far as the German barbed wire to give 
the last rites to dying men. To-day, when I called on the 
Leinster battalion, he was away burying the poor boys who 
lie in the mud of the battlefield. There is no humour in 
that side of war, though Irish soldiers, and English soldiers 
too, refuse to be beaten by the foulest conditions until the 
last strength is out of them. In addition to the ordeal of 
battle they are enduring now a weather so abominable, when 
it is in the fields of battle, that men fight for days wet to 
the skin, lie out at night frozen stiff, and struggle after the 
enemy up to the knees in mud. So it was in this little battle 
of Bois-en-Hache, an historic episode in the battle°of Arras, 
because it broke the enemy's last hope of a counter-attack 



148 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

against Vimy Ridge. Through the Winding bHzzard of 
snow, the EngHsh and Irish troops attacked this hill above 
the River Souchez, and had to cross through a quagmire, 
so that numbers of them stuck up to the waist and could 
go neither forward nor backward, while they were swept 
by machine-gun and rifle fire. From that other hill, called 
the Pimple, to their right, which was not yet taken by the 
Canadians, one man came back wounded over that abom- 
inable ground under rifle-fire which spat bullets about him. 
He stumbled into shell-holes and crawled out again, and 
just as he reached the trench, fell dead across the parapet. 
Nearly all our men were hit in the head and body, none in 
the legs. That was because they were knee-deep in mud. 
Our men came back from this fighting like figures of clay, 
and so stiff at the joints that they can hardly walk, and 
with voices gone so that they speak in whispers. 

All over this lower slope of the Vimy Ridge is a litter 
of enormous destruction caused by our gun-fire. German 
guns and limbers, machine-guns and trench-mortars lie in 
fragments and in heaps in infernal chaos of earth, which 
is the graveyard of many German dead. The first hint 
that the Germans were in retreat from Lievin, near Lens, 
was given by the strange adventure of two of our airmen. 
They had to make a forced landing near Lens, and one of 
them was wounded in the leg. Our observing officers 
watching through glasses expected them to be made pris- 
oners, but they were seen afterwards smoking cigarettes 
and slapping themselves to keep warm. It now turns out 
that the German soldiers did not wait to take them, and 
finding one man wounded left the other to look after him. 
The next sign that the enemy was about to go was when 
the fires and explosions went up in Lievin and Lens, and 
when he began to shell his own front lines outside those 
places. All through the night the sky was aflame with these 
fires, and this morning I saw that the enemy was making 
a merry little hell in Lens and all its suburbs and dependent 
villages. I had no need to guess the reason of all this. On 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 149 

the way I had met two young Alsatian prisoners just cap- 
tured. They had been left with orders and charges to blow 
up mine-shafts, but had been caught before they had done 
so. They had no heart in the job anyhow, being of Alsace, 
and with their comrades had already petitioned to fight on 
the Eastern instead of the Western Front. They described 
the panic that reigned in Lens, and the fearful haste to 
destroy and get away. For hours to-day I watched that 
destruction while our troops were working forward through 
Lievin to get the better of the nests of machine-gun redoubts 
at the entrance to Lens, from which intense fire still came. 
I had an astounding view of all this work in Lens, and 
it was as beautiful as a dream-picture and weird as a night- 
mare. The snows had melted, and the wind had turned 
south, and the sun was pouring down imder a blue sky 
across which white fleece sailed. Below, outspread, was a 
wide panorama of battle, from Loos to Vimy, the great 
panorama of French mining country, with all its slag-hills 
casting black shadows across the sun-swept plain, and thou- 
sands of miners' cottages, "corons" as they are called, all 
bright and red as the light poured upon them, all arranged 
in straight rows and oblong blocks of streets in separate 
townships. Not one of these houses was without shell-holes 
and broken walls, for the war has swept round them and 
over them for two years and more, but they looked strangely 
new and complete. Between them and beyond them and all 
about them tall chimneys stood and enormous steel girders 
and gantries of pit-head and power stations. To the left 
of Lens the tower of the main waterworks was crowned 
with a white dome like a Grecian temple, and to the right 
was Lens Church, behind a hill where I saw our men 
fighting. It was like looking at war in Bolton or Wigan, 
but more beautiful than those towns of ours, because the 
walls were not black and there was a bright, fine light over 
all this mining country. The Double Grassier on the edge 
of the Loos battlefields was to the left of where I stood, 
curiously white and chalky as the sun flung its rays upon 



150 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

those two close hillocks. Moving forward towards Lens 
I looked straight down the streets of that city. If a cat 
had moved across one of those roads I should have seen 
it. If Germans had come out of any of those houses I 
should have seen them. But nothing moved up the streets 
or down them. All those straight streets were empty. It 
looked as if those thousands of red houses were uninhabited. 
But all the time I watched enormous explosions rose in 
Lens and Lievin, sending up volumes of curly smoke. The 
enemy was destroying the city and its priceless mining 
works. As the mines exploded it looked as if the earth 
had opened among all this maze of works and cottages, 
letting forth turbulent clouds of fire and smoke. It was 
mostly smoke with a stab of flame in the heart of it. Some 
of these thick, rising clouds were richly coloured with the 
red dust of cottages, but others were of absolute black, 
spreading out in mushroom shape monstrously. 

The explosions continued all the morning and afternoon, 
and after seeing those Alsatian prisoners I could imagine 
the German pioneers under the same orders going about 
with charges in the cellars of the houses and deep down 
in the mine-shafts and galleries setting their fuses and 
touching them off from a safe distance. It was dirty work. 
Meanwhile, our men advancing from Lievin, and through 
it, were having a hard and costly task to rout out the 
machine-gun emplacements, especially in two terrible strong 
redoubts known to us as Crook and Crazy Redoubts, de- 
fending the western side of Lens. But though these were 
strong, fortified positions, there were machine-guns in many 
other places' among all those groups of miners' cottages. 

I ought to explain that each group or collection of streets 
in the square blocks is called a ''cite." In the northern 
part of Lens there are the Cite St.-Pierre, the Cite St.- 
Edouard, the Cite St.-Laurent, the Cite Ste.-Auguste, and 
the Cite Ste.-Elisabeth. Westward there are the Cite Jeanne- 
d'Arc and the Cite St. -Theodore. South there are the Cite 
du Moulin and the Cite de Riaumont. Each one of these 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 151 

places had its own separate defences of barbed wire and 
sand-bag barricades, and each a nest of machine-guns. It 
is clear that when these guns were served by rear-guard 
posts, ordered to hold on to the last, a quick advance through 
Lens would have been at great and needless sacrifice of life. 
When our men were checked a while by the terrible sweep 
of bullets in the northern and western cites our artillery 
opened heavy fire and poured in shells, which I watched 
from ground below Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. I had walked 
on from that ridge and was looking into Lens when I saw 
a movement of men below an embankment to the right of 
the small hill in the south of the city called Bois de Riau- 
mont. Between the embankment and the hill was a sunken 
road leading just below the hill to a long straight street 
of ruined houses lined with an avenue of dead trees. There 
were belts of wire fixed down the hill-side from the wood 
on the crest. This ground, swept by sunlight, was the scene 
of a grim little drama which I watched with intense interest. 
At first I thought our men were about to make a direct 
assault upon the hill-side. They came swarming across the 
open ground in small groups widely scattered, but in two 
distinct waves. For a while they took cover under the 
embankment, while other groups crept up to them; then, 
after half an hour or so, they advanced again, half-left, 
at the double, led by an officer well in advance of all his men. 
They crossed the sunken road and went up the slope on 
the south side of the hill; but, instead of pressing up to 
the crest, suddenly disappeared into the long, straight street 
fringed with trees. No sooner had they gone down that 
sinister street than the enemy flung a barrage right along 
the embankment where they had first assembled. If they 
had still been there it would have been a tragic business, 
and I felt joyful that they had not waited longer. Other 
men crept up from the ground below where I stood, steered 
an erratic course, took cover in old German trenches, and 
then made short, sharp rushes till they dropped also into 
the sinister street. Later in the afternoon the enemy bar- 



152 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

raged his old line of trenches with heavy crumps — which 
is a way he has when he leaves a place — and presently shells 
began to fall unpleasantly near to where I stood, getting 
closer as time passed. I found it wise to shift three times, 
but on scaling the high ridge of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette 
again I lingered to look at the great picture of war out- 
spread below — that long seven-mile stretch of miners' vil- 
lages crowding densely up to Lens — the great outbursts of 
red and black smoke between the slag-heaps and chimneys 
away to the battlefield of Loos, across which sunlight and 
shadows chased in long bars — and our shell-fire heavy 
around Lens church and far beyond where enemy's troops 
and transport were hurrying in retreat. Overhead there 
was the loud droning of many aeroplanes and flights of 
invisible shells, shrill-voiced as they travelled with fright- 
ful speed. 

Later 

The weather has changed again since yesterday, and there 
is no blue in the sky to-day and no sunshine, but cold rain- 
storms, cloaking all the line of battle in shrouds of mist. 
Fires are still burning in Lens, the grey smoke is drifting 
across the mine-fields, and every hour there are big ex- 
plosions, showing that the German pioneers are still busy 
destroying all the wealth of machinery in the city and blow- 
ing up the roads before leaving. New prisoners describe 
all this frankly enough. Down one mine-shaft they flung 
20,000 hand-grenades. They have enormous stores of ex- 
plosives of every kind for this purpose, because this min- 
ing district was crammed with German stores. They had 
to leave Lievin in such haste that they could neither carry 
away this ammunition nor destroy all of it, and vast quan- 
tities of bombs, trench-mortars and shells have fallen into 
our hands. 

Yesterday the English and Irish troops who had taken 
Bois-en-Hache with such fine courage, in spite of the most 
severe conditions of weather and ground, worked farther 
forward through Lievin. Explosions from concealed 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 153 

charges burst around them, and machine-gun fire from 
many redoubts swept down the long, straight streets of 
miners' cottages ; but they worked their way up under cover, 
rushed several of the concrete emplacements, and took 
heroic risks with a most grim spirit. During the evening 
the enemy recovered from his first panic and sent support- 
ing troops back into Lens to hold the line of trenches and 
machine-gun forts on the western side in order to delay our 
advance on to Lens until he has had more time to make 
ready his positions in the Drocourt-Queant line, the Wotan 
end of the Hindenburg line, upon which we are forcing him 
to withdraw. It makes a difference to a number of poor 
souls expecting deliverance. According to prisoners there 
are about 2000 people, mostly women, old men, and chil- 
dren, living in the district of Lens, and waiting to break 
their way through to our side of the lines. 

I set out to find them this morning, as there were re- 
ported rumours that they had escaped through Lievin. But 
this is untrue. Owing to the German rally they are still 
hemmed in by the enemy's machine-gun redoubts, and I am 
told that they are down in the cellars of a neighbouring vil- 
lage, taking cover from the shell-fire which we are pouring 
on the hostile strong points located in their cites. 

Meanwhile our guns are finding human targets for 
slaughter. The sufferings of our men are great, their 
courage is tested by fire; but the fate of the enemy's sol- 
diers is atrocious beyond all imaginings. I have seen with 
my own eyes the effect of our gun-fire during the last fort- 
night, and it is annihilating. Owing to our destruction and 
capture of many batteries and the necessity of the German 
retreat to save further disaster, the enemy's infantry have 
been in desperate plight and have suffered torture. We 
have smashed their trenches, broken their telephone wires, 
imprisoned them in barrages through which no food can 
come. In captured letters and memoranda we find cries for 
rescue, pitiful in their despair. Here is a message from the 
3rd Battalion, 51st Infantry Regiment: 



164 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

"Since the telephone connexion is so inadequate it be- 
comes doubly necessary to call on the artillery by light 
signals. These are only of use if attended to. Failing 
to get artillery reply to the enemy's fire I sent up red star- 
shells. The artillery took no notice. The artillery should 
be bound to reply to such signals. 

"For our infantry, which since the Somme battles has 
been on the defensive, it is, from the point of view of moral, 
of importance to count on artillery support with certainty. 
The infantry that comes to regard itself morally as a target 
for the hostile artillery must in the long run give way." 

Here is an extract from a memorandum sent by a Ger- 
man machine-gunner : 

"The relief of this detachment is earnestly requested. 
We have already spent seven days in the greatest tumult. 
One section of trench after another gets blown in. The 
detachment, which now consists of three men, has eaten 
nothing since yesterday morning. To-morrow what re- 
mains of the front trenches will probably be shattered. If 
the position were not so frightfully serious, I would not 
have written this report." 

Yesterday I spent half an hour with one of our own 
batteries of 6o-pounders, those long-nosed beasts which 
have a range of five miles and have helped in this great 
slaughter of the enemy. The commanding officer, once a 
jufige-advocate of Johannesburg, was a man whose joviality 
covered a grim, resolute spirit. 

"My beauties," he said, "fired looo high-velocity shells 
at Old Fritz before breakfast on Monday morning. We 
did some very pretty work on the German lines." 

I saw his store of shells — monstrous brutes — in spite of 
all this expenditure; and listened to details of destruction 
in a wooden hut, provided with a piano — made by a Paris 
firm and captured recently in a German dug-out. 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 155 

"Don't your gunners get worn out ?" I asked. 

He laughed and said, ''They stick it till all's blue, night 
and day. What they hate are fatigues and carrying up 
the shells for other batteries. They'll work till they drop, 
serving their own guns." 

He looked over to Lens and said, "We'll soon have old 
Fritz out of that." I think they were some of his shells 
that I saw bursting behind the Bois de Riaumont. 

All through this battle our airmen have been untiring, 
too. Two of our men, a pilot and an observer, were at- 
tacked by a squadron of twenty-eight hostile machines, and 
the pilot was grievously wounded. He was badly hit in 
the leg, and one of his eyes hung only by a thread. But, 
with a supreme act of courage, he kept control of his 
machine and landed safely. He was dying when he was 
helped on to a stretcher and brought home to camp; but 
he made his report very clearly and calmly until he was 
overcome by the last faintness of death. 

Our men have still most bloody fighting before them. 
The enemy is still in great strength. We shall have to 
mourn most tragic and fearful losses. But the tide of 
battle seems to be setting in our favour, and beating back 
against the walls of the German armies, who must hear the 
approach of it with forebodings, because the barriers they 
built have broken and there are no impregnable ramparts 
behind. 

6 

The Slaughter at Lagnicourt 

April i6 
What happened at Lagnicourt yesterday is one of the 
bloodiest episodes in all this long tale of slaughter. At 
4.30, before daybreak, the enemy made a very heavy at- 
tack upon our lines, where we are far beyond the old system 
of trenches and for a time in real open warfare of the 



156 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

old style, which I, for one, never believed' would come 
again. The enemy's lines were protected with a new belt of 
barbed wire, without which he can never stay on any kind 
of ground; but it was this which proved his undoing. His 
massed attack against Australian troops had a brief success. 
Battalions of Prussian Guards, charging in waves, broke 
through our forward posts, and drove a deep wedge into 
our positions. Here they stayed for a time, doing what 
damage they could, searching round for prisoners, and 
waiting, perhaps, for reserves to renew and strengthen the 
impetus of their attack. But the Australian staff officers 
were swift in preparing and delivering the counter-blow, 
which fell upon the enemy at 7.30. Companies of Aus- 
tralians swept forward, and with irresistible spirit flung 
themselves upon the Prussians, forcing them to retreat. 
They fell back in an obHque line from their way of ad- 
vance, forced deliberately that way by the pressure and 
direction of the Australian attack. At the same time our 
batteries opened fire upon them with shrapnel as they ran, 
more and more panic-stricken, towards their old lines. The 
greatest disaster befell them, for they found themselves cut 
off by their own wire, those great broad belts of sharp 
spiked strands which they had planted to bar us off. 

What happened then was just appalling slaughter. The 
Australian infantry used their rifles as never rifles have 
been used since the first weeks of the war, when our old 
regulars of the first expeditionary force lay down at Le 
Cateau on the way of their retreat and fired into the advanc- 
ing tide af Germans, so that they fell in lines. 

Yesterday, in that early hour of the morning, the Aus- 
tralian riflemen fired into the same kind of target of massed 
men, not far away, so that each shot found the mark. The 
Prussians struggled frantically to tear a way through the 
wire, to climb over it, crawl under it. They cursed and 
screamed, ran up and down like rats in a trap, until they 
fell dead. They fell so that dead bodies were piled upon 
dead bodies in long lines of mortality before and in the 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 157 

midst of that spiked wire. They fell and hung across its 
strands. The cries of the wounded, long tragic wails, rose 
high above the roar of rifle-fire and the bursting of shrapnel. 
And the Australian soldiers, quiet and grim, shot on and on 
till each man had fired a hundred rounds, till more than 
fifteen hundred German corpses lay on the field at Lagni- 
court. Large numbers of prisoners were taken, wounded 
and unwounded, and five Prussian regiments have been 
identified. The Prussian Guard has always suffered from 
British troops as by some dire fatality. At Ypres, at Con- 
talmaison, in several of the Somme battles, they were cut 
to pieces. But this massacre at Lagnicourt is the worst 
episode in their history, and it will be remembered by the 
German people as a black and fearful thing. 



7 

The Terrors of the Scarpe 

April 23 
The battle of Arras has entered into its second phase — that 
is to say, into a struggle harder than the first days of the 
battle on April 9, when by a surprise, following great prepa- 
rations, we gained great successes all along the line. 

This morning, shortly before five o'clock, English, Welsh, 
and Scottish troops made new and strong assaults east of 
Arras upon the German line between Gavrelle, Guemappe, 
and Fontaine-lez-Croisilles, which is the last switch-line on 
this part of the Front between us and the main Hinden- 
burg line. It has been hard fighting everywhere, for the 
enemy was no longer uncertain of the place where we should 
attack him. As soon as the battle of Arras started it was 
clear to him that we should deliver our next blow when 
we had moved forward our guns upon this "Oppy" line, as 
we call it, which protects the Hindenburg positions north 
and south of Vitry-en-Artois. His troops were told to 



158 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 



expect our attack at any moment, and to hold on at all 
costs of life. To meet our strength the enemy brought up 
many new batteries, which he placed in front of the Hin- 

denburg line, and close 
behind the Oppy line, 
and massed large num- 
bers of machine-guns 
in the villages, trenches, 
and emplacements, 
from which he could 
sweep our line of ad- 
vance by direct and en- 
filade fire. These ma- 
chine-guns were thick 
in the ruins of Rceux, 
just north of the River 
Scarpe; in Pelves, just 
south of it, in two 
small woods called Bois 
du Sart and Bois du 
Vert, immediately fac- 
ing Monchy, on the 
slope of the hill ; and in 
and about the village 
of Guemappe, which 
we had assaulted and 
entered twice before. 
Many German snipers, 
men of good marks- 
m a n s h i p and tried 
courage, were placed 
all about in shell-holes 
with orders to pick off our officers and men, and the 
enemy's gunners had registered all our positions so that 
they were ready to drop down a heavy barrage directly 
our men made a sign of attacking. For some days after 
the second day of the battle of Arras they had fired a great 




Line on April 23, 1917 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 169 

many shells along and behind our front lines in order to 
shake the nerve of our troops, and had poured fire into 
Monchy-on-the-Hill after its capture by our cavalry and 
infantry during those deadly hours of fighting already de- 
scribed. It was only to be expected that this second phase 
of the battle of Arras should be extremely hard. For our 
men it is a battle to the death. Fighting is in progress at 
all the points attained by our troops, and there is an ebb 
and flow of men — beaten back for a while by intensity of 
fire, but attacking again and getting forward. It is certain 
that Gavrelle is ours (thus breaking the Oppy line north 
of the River Scarpe) ; that our men are beyond Guemappe, 
on the south of the Scarpe, though the enemy is still fight- 
ing at this hour of the afternoon in or about that village; 
and that on the extreme right of the attack the enemy has 
suffered disaster north of Croisilles, and has lost large num- 
bers of men in killed and prisoners. 

At the outset of the attack the enemy showed himself 
ready to meet it with a fierce resistance. Last night was 
terribly cold, and our troops lying out in shell-holes or in 
shallow trenches dug a day or two ago, suffered from this 
exposure. The Scottish troops of the 15th Division on the 
south of the Scarpe had fought in the first days' battles of 
Arras, and, with English troops of the 37th, had gone for- 
ward to Monchy and into the storm-centre of the German 
fire. Some of the men I met to-day had been buried by 
German crumps, and had been dug out again, and as they 
lay waiting for the hour of attack shells fell about them and 
the sky was aflame with flashes of our bombs. The men 
craved for something hot to drink. "I would have given 
all the money I have for a cup of tea," said one of them. 
But they nibbled dry biscuits and waited for the dawn, and 
hoped they would not be too numb when the light came 
to get up and walk. The light came very pale over the 
earth, and with it the signal to attack. Our bombardment 
had been steady all through the night, and then broke into 
hurricane fire. As soon as our men left the trenches our 



160 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

gunners laid down a barrage in front of them, and made 
a moving wall of shells ahead of them — a frightful thing 
to follow, but the safest if the men did not go too quick or 
fail to distinguish between the line of German shells and our 
own. It was not easy to distinguish, for our men had 
hardly risen from the shell-holes and ditches before the 
enemy's barrage started, and all the ground about them was 
vomiting up fountains of mud and shell-splinters. At the 
same time there came above all the noise of shell-fire a 
furnace-blast of machine-guns. Machine-gunners in Roeux 
and Pelves, in the two small woods in front of Monchy, 
and in the ground about Guemappe were slashing all the 
slopes and roads below Monchy-on-the-Hill. 

"It was the most awful machine-gun fire I have heard," 
said a young Gordon this morning, as he came back with 
a bullet in his hip. "The beggars were ready for us, and 
made it very hot. But we folk went on, those of us who 
weren't hit quickly, and made an attack on the village of 
Guemappe." 

"The enemy dropped his barrage on to us mighty quick," 
said a Worcestershire lad, "but we managed, most of us, 
to get past his crumps. It took a lot of dodging in shell- 
holes, and the worst was his machine-gun fire, which was 
terrific." 

Below Monchy the enemy was in trenches defended by 
enfilade fire from redoubts along the Cambrai road, and 
when our English troops swept down on them the Germans 
ran at once up their own slope to the cover of a wood called 
Bois du Sart. Only one officer and two men remained, 
and they were taken prisoner, and I saw them being marched 
back under escort. The officer was a young Bavarian with- 
out a hat; he bore himself very jauntily, though his face 
was white and he was covered with dirt. 

The Worcesters and Hampshires of the 29th Division, 
farther north and just south of the Scarpe, were held up for 
some time by the intensity of the machine-gun fire, and 
before getting on had to wait the arrival of a Tank which 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 161 

was crawling up by way of the lone copse. They were then 
fighting heavily about Shrapnel-and-Bayonet Trench, and 
afterwards made their way forward again under heavy fire, 
and passed a number of German snipers lying in shell-holes 
to right and left of them. They were sv/ept by machine- 
gun fire and heavily counter-attacked. 

To the north of the River Scarpe our progress was 
quicker, and Scottish battalions of the 15th Division made 
their advance towards Roeux by way of a fortified farm 
and chemical works, in which machine-guns were hid- 
den. Round about here the enemy lost very heavily. In 
trying to escape from the ruins of the farm many of them 
were killed and lay in a row to the left of the place. In 
the chemical works those who had not escaped before our 
men were upon them surrendered at once. The attack and 
capture of Gavrelle, which broke the Oppy line, was the 
best thing done on the left of the attack. This is important 
ground for future operations. 

Guemappe, to the south of the river, is the scene of the 
most severe attacks and counter-attacks; and it is clear that 
the enemy sets a great price on this heap of bricks, because 
of its position on the Cambrai road. Before this morning 
it has been the scene of fierce encounters; and to-day the 
3rd Bavarian Division (which has taken the place of the 
1 8th Division, at whom they had jeered for losing so many 
prisoners in recent battles) is at close quarters with our 
men; and round about the village there is deadly hand-to- 
hand fighting. The trenches here are full of Germans, and 
the enemy has sent up supports. 

The loist Pomeranian Regiment, belonging to the 35th 
Reserve Division, surrendered in solid masses to our men 
in the neighbourhood of Fontaine-lez-Croisilles. For sev- 
eral days they had suffered under our bombardment, and 
it so shook their nerve that as soon as our troops advanced 
they came out of their dug-outs in the support trenches — 
the front line was not held at all — and gave themselves to 
our men in blocks of 500 without any attempt to fight. On 



162 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

this ground between the Cojeul and Sensee rivers, where 
our advance was on a curved line following the shape of 
the rising ground, we took at least 1200 prisoners and a 
battery of field-guns. 

It is fortunate — in counting the high price of the battle — 
that many of our wounded are only lightly touched by 
shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. I saw these walking 
wounded coming back; tired, brave men, who bore their 
pain with most stoic endurance, so that there was hardly 
a groan to be heard among them. Now and again overhead 
was the shrill whine of an approaching shell, "Whistling 
Percy" by name, but they paid no heed after their great 
escape from the far greater peril. They formed up in a 
long queue outside the dressing-station, where doctors 
waited for them, and where there was a hot drink to be 
had. They were covered with mud, and were too weary 
and spent to talk. That long line of silent, wounded men 
will always remain in my memory. 

Outside in the sunlight, waiting their turn to enter the 
dressing-station, some of the men lay down on the bank in 
queer, distorted attitudes very like death, and slept there. 
Others came hobbling with each arm round the neck of the 
stretcher-bearers, or led forward blind, gropingly. It was 
the whimper of these blind boys and the agony on their 
faces which was most tragic in all this tragedy, those and 
the men smashed about the face and head so that only 
their eyes stared through white masks. Near by were Ger- 
man prisoners standing against the sunlit wall, pale, sick, 
and hungry-looking men, utterly dejected. A German aero- 
plane flew overhead on the way behind our lines, shot at 
all the way by our anti-aircraft guns, but very bold. Our 
kite-balloons, white as snow-clouds in the blue sky, stared 
over the battlefield where our men are still fighting in the 
midst of great shell-fire. 

April 25 

This battle which is still in progress east of Arras is de- 
veloping rather like the early days of the Somme battles, 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 163 

when our men fought stubbornly to gain or regain a few 
hundred yards of trenches in which the enemy resisted 
under the cover of great gun-fire, and to which he sent up 
strong bodies of supporting troops to drive our men out 
by counter-attacks. In the ground east of Monchy, be- 
tween the Scarpe and the Sensee rivers, the situation is 
exactly like that, and, as I said yesterday, the line of battle 
has ebbed to and fro in an astounding way, British and 
German troops fighting forwards and backwards over 
the same ground with alternating success. 

An attack made by Scottish troops of the 15th Division 
yesterday afternoon, and by English troops of the 29th at 
3.30 this morning, re-established our line on this side of 
the two woods called Bois du Vert and Bois du Sart, and 
on the farther side of Guemappe. Parties of British troops 
who had been cut off and were believed to be in the hands 
of the enemy were recovered yesterday, having held out in 
a most gallant way in isolated positions. Among them 
were some of the Argylls and men of the Middlesex Regi- 
ment. Our barrage preceding an infantry attack actually 
swept over them, and they gave themselves up for lost, but 
escaped from the British shells and the German shells which 
burst all round them and seemed in competition for their 
lives. 

A similar case happened with a party of Worcester men 
recovered last night. They were cut off in a small copse, 
and lay quiet there for several days, surrounded by the 
enemy. They had their iron rations with them, and lived 
on these until they were gone. They were then starving 
and suffering great agony from lack of water. But still 
they would not surrender, and last night were rewarded 
for their endurance by seeing the enemy retire before the 
advancing waves of English troops. 

The enemy is suffering big losses, but is replacing them 
each time by fresh battalions. The Fourth Division of 
the Prussian Guards has now been brought up against us, 
among several other new divisions. They continue to show 



164 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

determination to hold us back from a nearer approach to 
the Hindenburg Hne in spite of the frightful casualties 
already suffered. There have been no fewer than eight 
counter-attacks already upon the village of Gavrelle, and 
not one of them has reached our men, but they have been 
broken and dispersed. 

In the first counter-attack upon our line opposite Monchy, 
between 2000 and 3000 Germans left the Bois du Vert, but 
after many hundreds had fallen retired to reorganize. The 
second attack was in greater numbers and rolled back our 
line for a time, but has now been forced to retire to its 
old position in the woods, which we keep continually under 
intense fire, so that much slaughter must be there. 

Our guns never cease their labouring night and day, and 
are shelling the enemy's infantry positions, batteries, lines 
of communication, rail-heads, and cross-roads, so that no 
troops may move except under the menace of death or 
mutilation. Nevertheless, faced by great peril to his main 
defensive lines, the enemy is massing troops rapidly for 
battle on even a bigger scale. Our own men are passing 
through fiery ordeals with that courage which is now known 
to the whole world, so that I need not labour to describe 
it — a patient courage in great hardships, self-sacrifice in 
the midst of great perils, sane and unbroken in spite of 
horrors upon which the imagination dare not dwell. 

From the colonel of the Worcesters of the 29th Division 
I heard to-day a narrative which would surely make the 
angels weep, but though just out of the infernal ordeal he 
told it calmly, and his hand only trembled slightly as he 
pointed on his trench-map to positions which his men had 
taken and where they had most suffered. His story deals 
with only a small section of the battle front, and all the 
fighting which he directed had for its object certain trenches 
which would mean nothing if I gave their names. (They 
were Strong and Windmill Trench.) 

His battalion headquarters were in a dug-out actually 
in the front trench line from which his men attacked, and 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 165 

it was lucky, for after the troops had gone forward the 
enemy's barrage fell behind them and destroyed the ground. 
The colonel, with his adjutant, his sergeant-major, and his 
servant, shared this battle headquarters with the command- 
ing officer and staff of the Hampshires, but not for long. 
Heavy German crumps were smashing round them, and 
the enemy's barrage-fire swept up and down searching for 
human life. The colonel of the Hampshires was wounded, 
and two of his officers were killed. The colonel of the 
Worcesters, who was left to record this history, could tell 
very little of what was happening to his men there in the 
battle less than a thousand yards away. A wounded ser- 
geant came back and said that the left company was hold- 
ing out against German counter-attacks. Later two young 
officers came back to Pick-and-Shrapnel Trench with a 
party of men and said they had been ordered to retire 
by a strange captain. The colonel rallied the men, and 
they went back and retook Windmill Trench near by. Mes- 
sages came down that men were half mad for lack of wa- 
ter. The colonel sent up water by a carrying-party, but 
he believes that they delivered it to the enemy, who had 
crept up through the darkness which had now fallen. All 
through the day on each side of this Worcestershire colonel 
great bodies of troops were fighting forward under intense 
shell-fire. He saw the enemy's massed counter-attacks 
slashed by our shrapnel and machine-gun fire, and our field- 
batteries galloping to forward positions, but he could see 
nothing of his own men after they had once gone forward 
down the sloping ground. His runners were killed or fell 
senseless from shell-shock. He himself was buried by a 
shell and dug out again by his sergeant-major. In the 
night he was left quite alone, surrounded by dead. 

That is one experience in the great battle, and thousands 
of our men endured and are enduring dreadful things in 
the fierce fighting and under intense fire. Once out of it, 
they are calm and self-controlled, as I saw many of them 
to-day just as they had been relieved, and the strongest 



166 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

expression they use is, "It is very hot, sir," or "I didn't 
think I should come back." 

The wounded are marvellous. The lightly wounded have 
a long way to walk, hobbling for miles down unsafe roads. 
Many of them walked back through Monchy when it was 
a flaming torch. Weary and dazed they came to the casu- 
alty clearing-station, not even now beyond the range of 
shell-fire, so that men who have escaped from the battle- 
fields, waiting to have their wounds dressed; hear the old 
shrill whistle of the approaching menace, but do not care. 
It is only by such courage that our men can gain any 
ground from the enemy, and it is such courage that beats 
back all those heavy counter-attacks which the enemy is 
now hurling against us up by Gavrelle and by Monchy-on- 
the-Hill. 

8 

The Background of Battle 

April 30 
There has been but little time lately to describe the scene 
of war or to chronicle the small human episodes of this 
great battle between Lens and St.-Quentin, with its storm- 
centre at Arras, where men are fighting in mass, killing in 
mass, dying in mass. Some day one of our soldiers now 
fighting — some young man with a gift of words — will write 
for all time the story of all this: the beauty and the ugli- 
ness and the agony of it, the colour and the smell and the 
movement of it, with intimate and passionate remembrance. 
It is a memorable battle-picture in modern history, and in 
the mass of hundreds of thousands of men, obedient to 
the high command, which uses them as parts of the great 
war machine, is the individual with his own separate expe- 
rience and initiative, with his sense of humour and his 
suffering, and his courage and his fear. 

The scene of battle has changed during these last few 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 167 

days because spring has come at last, and warm simshine. 
It has made a tremendous difference to the look of things, 
and to the sense of things. A week ago our men were 
marching through rain and sleet, through wild quagmire of 
old battlefields which stretch away behind our new front 
lines, through miles of shell-craters and dead woods and 
destroyed villages. They fought wet and fought cold, and 
their craving was for hot drink. Yesterday, after a few 
days of warmth, our troops on the march were powdered 
white with dust, and they fought hot and fought thirsty, 
and the wounded cried for water to cool their burning 
throats. Men going up to the lines in lorries stared out 
through masks of dust which made them look like pierrots. 
Their steel helmets, upon which rain pattered a week ago, 
were like millers' hats. More frightful now, even than 
in the worst days of winter, is the way up to the Front 
In all that broad stretch of desolation we have left behind 
us the shell-craters which were full of water, red water and 
green water, are now dried up, and are hard, deep pits, 
scooped out of powdered earth, from which all vitality has 
gone, so that spring brings no life to it. I thought perhaps 
some of these shell-slashed woods would put out new shoots 
when spring came, and watched them curiously for any sign 
of rebirth, but there is no sign, and their poor, mutilated 
limbs, their broken and tattered trunks, stand naked under 
the blue sky. Everything is dead with a white, ghastly look 
in the brilliant sunshine except where here and there in the 
litter of timber and brickwork which marks the site of a 
French village, a little bush is in bud, or flowers blossom in 
a scrap-heap which was once a garden. All this is the back- 
ground of our present battle, and through this vast stretch 
of barren country our battalions move slowly forward to 
take their part in the battle when their turn comes, resting a 
night or two among the ruins where other men who work 
always behind the lines, road-mending, wiring, on supply 
columns, at ammunition dumps, in casualty clearing-stations 
and rail-heads, have made their billets on the lee side of 



168 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

broken walls or in holes dug deep by the enemy and re- 
ported safe for use. Dead horses lie on the roadsides or 
in shell-craters. I passed a row of these poor beasts as 
though all had fallen down and died together in a last 
comradeship. Dead Germans, or bits of dead Germans, lie 
in old trenches, and these fields are the graveyards of 
Youth. 

Farther forward the earth is green again in strips. The 
bombardment has not yet torn it and pitted it, and the shell- 
craters are scarcer and their sloping sides are fresh. One 
gets to know the date of a crater, and its freshness is a 
warning sign that the enemy's guns dislike this patch of 
ground and anything that may live there. So it is that one 
gets close to the present fighting, and now under this first 
sunshine of the year there is a strange and terrible beauty 
in the battle-picture. 

I watched our shelling of the Hindenburg line at Queant 
from the ground by Lagnicourt, where the Australians 
slaughtered the enemy in the recent counter-attack. White 
as fleecy clouds in the sky was the smoke of our shrapnel 
bursts, and there was the glinting and flashing of shells 
above the enemy's trench, which wound like a tape on the 
slope of the rising ground above the village of Queant, and 
through the fringe of trees below. A storm of shells broke 
over Bullecourt to the left, and the enemy was answering 
back with 5-9's, searching the valley which runs down from 
Noreuil, as I watched it while it was under fire. The Ger- 
mans were i>arraging the crest of the hill, with their univer- 
sal-shell bursting high with black oily clouds. One of our 
aeroplanes had fallen, and the enemy's gunners in the Hin- 
denburg line tried to destroy it by long-range sniping. Our 
own guns were firing steadily, so that the sky was filled with 
invisible flights of shells, and always there came down the 
humming song of our aeroplanes, and their wings were 
dazzling and diaphanous as they were caught by the sun's 
rays. That is the picture one sees now along any part of 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 169 

our line, but the adventure of the men inside the smoke- 
drifts is more human in its aspect. 

It was a queer scene when the Australians went into Lag- 
nicourt. Some Germans were still hiding in their dug-outs, 
and the Australian troops searched for them with fixed 
bayonets. In some of these hiding-places they found great 
stores of German beer, and it was a good find for men 
thirsty and glad of a smoke. So this mopping-up battalion, 
as it is called, mopped up the beer, which was very light 
and refreshing, and, with fat cigars between their teeth, a 
bottle of beer in one hand and a bayonet ready in the other, 
continued their hunt for prisoners. During the fighting 
hereabouts 200 German soldiers came across under the white 
flag as a sign of surrender, but they were seen by their own 
machine-gunners, who shot them down without mercy. So 
one gets comedy and tragedy hand-in-hand here, and, in- 
deed, the whole tale of this fighting on the way to Queant 
is a mixture of gruesome horror and fantastic mirth, which 
makes men laugh grimly when telling the tale of it. 

I went about three days ago over the battlefield with a 
young Australian officer, a gallant man and a quick walker, 
who was the first to get news of the enemy's attack. He 
was at headquarters, awake but sleepy, in the small hours of 
morning. 

Presently the telephone bell tinkled. "Hallo," said the 
Australian officer and yawned. A small voice spoke : "The 
enemy has broken through. He has got to Lagnicourt," 

"What's that ?" said the officer at the 'phone. It seemed 
a silly joke at such an hour. The message was repeated, 
and my friend was very wide awake, and what happened 
afterwards was very rapid. 

The Australian Gunner-General gave orders to stop up 
the gaps in the German wire through which the enemy had 
come. They were closed by shell-fire. The attacking col- 
umn, having failed in time to destroy the field-guns, tried 
to escape, but found their retreat cut off. Three thousand 
of them suffered appalling casualties, and I saw some of 



170 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

their dead bodies lying on the ground three days ago, 
though most have now been buried. 

On another part of the Hne held by the English troops a 
queer bird was captured the other day. . It was a blue bird 
in the form of a German ofificer wearing a gay uniform, 
with a big cloak and spurs, brought down by one of our 
airmen. He seemed sleepy when caught, and yawned po- 
litely behind a closed hand, and explained the cause of his 
unfortunate appearance behind our lines. It appears that 
the commanding officer of his air squadron at Cambrai went 
on leave, and his officers and other friends consoled them- 
selves by drinking good red wine. In the morning, after 
a late night, they decided to go out on reconnaissance; 
and the officer in the sky-blue cloak agreed that he also 
would make a flight, and so perform his duty to the Father- 
land. A pilot took him up; but, instead of making a recon- 
naissance, he fell fast asleep and saw nothing of a British 
aeroplane swooping upon him from a high cloud. A bullet 
in the petrol-tank drove down the German machine, and the 
officer in the' sky-blue cloak stepped out, saluted, surren- 
dered, and a little later fell asleep again. 

An air prisoner is always more noticeable than the batches 
of infantry who come back to our lines after one of our at- 
tacks, but there was something unusual in the sight of sev- 
enty-three Germans led by a young English soldier from the 
zone of fire in this latest fighting. Our man was a young 
private of Suffolks, chubby-faced and small in body, though 
of a high spirit. 

"What are you doing with those men?" asked an officer. 
"Why isn't there a proper escort?" 

"They arc my prisoners," said the boy; "they have just 
surrendered to me, and I'm taking them back to our camp." 

During attacks near Monchy one of our young officers 
was lying in a shell-hole with a thin line of men, mostly 
wounded. Presently a Tank crawled up, and a voice spoke 
from it : "That's a hot spot of yours. You had better come 
inside for a bit." 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 171 

"How shall I get in?" said the young infantry officer. 

A voice from the Tank said: "Come roimd to this side." 
The young officer climbed in through a hole, and said 
"Thanks very much" to the Tank officer, who drove him 
close to the enemy's line, enabled him to see the position, and 
then brought him back to his shell-hole. 

These things are happening on the field of battle, and 
there are many of our officers and men who have such fan- 
tastic experiences, and tell them as though they were normal 
adventures of life. 

9 

How THE Scots Took Guemappe 

May I 
Birds are singing their spring songs on this May Day in the 
woods very close to where men are fighting, and the fields 
on the edge of the shell-crater country are yellow with cow- 
slips, so that war seems more hateful than ever, when the 
earth is so good, and all the colour and scent of it. But the 
work of war goes on whatever the weather. To-day, as well 
as yesterday, the enemy's chief targets were Arleux, cap- 
tured by the Canadians, and Guemappe, which fell to Scot- 
tish troops, both of which places he has tried to take back 
by repeated and violent counter-attacks. He is still in a 
trench on the east side of Guemappe, running down to a bit 
of ruin called Cavalry Farm, where there has been close 
fighting for several days since the great battle on April 23, 
when Guemappe was taken by the Scots of the 15th Divi- 
sion. 

That battle round Guemappe is a great episode in the his- 
tory of the Scottish troops in France. It was fighting which 
lasted for nearly a week after the hour of attack in the first 
daylight of April 23. At that hour long waves of the Sea- 
forths. Black Watch, and Camerons left the trenches they 
had dug under shell-fire, and went forward towards Gue- 



172 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

mappe. They were faced at once by blasts of machine-gun 
fire, and although our artillery barrage crashed across the 
field some of the German strong points were still held in 
force. At one, about which I know most, there was a gap 
between the Seaforths and Camerons owing to the feeble 
light of the dawn, in which men could only dimly see, but 
this was filled up by some companies of the Black Watch. 
For nearly three hours the Scots were held up by the fire of 
German machine-guns and artillery, and suffered many cas- 
ualties, but they fought on, each little group of men acting 
with separate initiative, and it is to their honour as soldiers 
that they destroyed every machine-gun post in front of them. 
One sergeant of the Black Watch fought his way down a 
bit of trench alone and knocked out the gun-crew so that 
the line could advance. Two hundred prisoners were taken 
in that first forward sweep, when the Seaforths advanced in 
long lines and went through and beyond the village of 
Guemappe with loud shouts and cheers. They were checked 
again by machine-gun fire from many different directions, 
and immediately from the ruin called Cavalry Farm ahead 
of them. This was afterwards cleared, and many Germans 
lie dead there. Then between eleven and twelve in the 
morning the enemy developed his first counter-attack. He 
massed masses of men in the valley below Guemappe, flung 
a storm of shells on to the village, and then sent forward 
his troops to work round the spur on which the Highland- 
ers held their line. It was then that the Camerons and 
Black Watch showed their fierce and stubborn fighting spirit. 
They tore* rents in the lines of advancing Bavarians with 
Lewis-gun and rifle-grenade fire, and the enemy's losses 
were great, so that the supporting troops passed over lines 
of dead comrades. But the attack was pressed by strong 
bodies of men, and the thin lines of the Scots, exhausted by 
long hours of fighting, were forced to swing back. 

We now know that first reports were wrong, when it was 
said that the enemy retook Guemappe for a time. He never 
set foot in it again, though the Scottish line fell back. Little 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 173 

groups of Highland officers and men refused to retreat. 
Some of them held the cemetery and defended it against all 
attacks. A captain of the Black Watch with seventy men 
remained in the north of the village for four hours, though 
they had no protection on either flank. One officer and 
twelve men of the Camerons at another spot refused to leave 
during the retirement, and were found still holding out when 
their comrades renewed their attack and regained the 
ground. Another officer of the Camerons lost all the men 
of his machine-gun team, but brought up the gun himself 
and worked it with another officer already wounded. After- 
wards, to save ammunition, he sniped the enemy with their 
own rifles which they had dropped on the field. Later the 
village of Guemappe was isolated, for our artillery bom- 
bardment prevented all approach by the enemy. Then an- 
other brigade of Scots streamed round by the north of the 
village, and the whole line of Highland troops swept back 
the enemy. By that time the Bavarian troops had no more 
fight in them, and knew they were beaten. They retired in 
great disorder, leaving great numbers of dead and wounded. 

For a day and a half the Scots were able to rest a little, 
though always under shell-fire; but afterwards there was 
fierce patrol fighting round Cavalry Farm and in outposts 
near by. The enemy's fire was intense, and he commanded 
this position from the high ground to the north, but small 
parties of Scots held on doggedly outside the ruins of the 
farm until, after five days, they were withdrawn. 

I have told all this briefly; but, even so, I hope it may 
reveal a little of the stubborn courage with which those 
men refused to give way, and when forced back for a few 
hours after great losses, regained the ground they had cap- 
tured with a spirit which belongs to the history of their 
fighting clans. 



174 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

lo 

The Oppy Line 

May 2 
There have been no strong infantry attacks along our 
front to-day, none of any kind as far as I know. It has 
been a day for the guns alone, and as my ears could bear 
witness, and every nerve in my body, they have made the 
most of it under the blue sky. All our batteries were hard 
at work, heavy howitzers with broad blunt snouts, long- 
muzzled long-ranged 6o-pounders, and farther forward, on 
the landscape of the battlefield, field-guns drumming out 
salvos with staccato knocks above the full deep blasts of the 
monsters behind them. 

Somehow in this bright sunlight, flooding all the country- 
side with a golden haze and painting the fields with vivid 
colour — yellow where the new shell-holes had dug deep pits, 
red-brown where it had lain quiet since the war, emerald- 
green where strips of grass grew between the plots of barbed 
wire and a tangle of old trenches — on such a day as this, 
with a light wind driving fleecy clouds through the sky, 
and wild flowers like little stars at one's feet, and larks sing- 
ing with a high ecstasy, war and blood and death seemed 
abominably out of place. Yet they were there all three, 
round about Oppy and Gavrelle, and on the ground below 
Bailleul, thrust before one's eyes, rising to one's nostrils, 
making hideous noises about one. It would have been so 
much better in such a May as this to stroll on the way to 
Oppy, in this first sunshine of the year, without a thought 
of what men might be watching. But when, standing on 
the crest above, I showed half my body above a bit of earth, 
an officer who lives below the earth said, "It's better to 
keep down. The blighters can see us all right." 

And to stroll into Oppy one must have many machine- 
guns with one, and be preceded by a storm of heavy shells, 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 175 

making a steel wall before one. One day soon, I suppose, 
our men will go in again like that, to find a litter of men's 
bodies, some living men trembling in cellars, and another 
little bit of hell. We were making a hell of it to-day for 
any young Germans there. Our guns made good target 
practice of it, flinging up rosy clouds of dust from its ruins 
of red brick. But one house still stands in Oppy Wood. It 
is a big white chateau, which is clearly visible with empt)^ 
windows and broken roofs through a thin fringe of dead 
trees. A sinister ghostly place, even at broad noonday, and 
no man alive would sit alone there in its big salon unless he 
had gone mad with shell-shock, for that white house is 
another target for guns, and while I watched our shells 
crashed through the trees about it. 

Below Oppy, where our men fought a few days ago, is 
Gavrelle, which is ours, above Greenland Hill, where there 
is a broken village among the trees, from which we can 
look down across the River Scarpe. To the left of Oppy 
is Arleux-en-Gohelle, recently captured by Canadians, who 
fought through its streets, and to the southern side of it is 
the ruin of a sugar factory, 500 yards or so from the out- 
skirts of Bailleul, an old grey place, with broken walls and 
roofs, and a railway station with a deep embankment. These 
places were targets for the German guns, especially Arleux 
and Bailleul railway station, and heavy crumps came whin- 
ing and then crashing, and flinging up clouds of black smoke 
— as black and as big as the evil genii that came from the 
bottle and played the devil. 

The enemy's guns were very active to-day, as our com- 
munique would say. But one of our forward observing 
officers, a young man in a dusty ditch, with a telescope and 
a telephone, and a steel hat which is only a faith cure for 
heavy shell-fire, was chuckling over this morning's business. 

*'It was very funny," he said. "The Boche started coun- 
ter-battery work, but we answered back too quick, and 
knocked out one of his batteries smack in the eye. That 
group has kept quiet since then." 



176 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

He pointed to some broken things lying about the field 
outside Oppy, and said : "The aeroplanes have been drop- 
ping about a good deal. There has been some very hot work 
in this part of the sky." The sky above us then was full of 
the throb and hum of aeroplanes, and to the tune of them 
birds went on singing, but other birds, invisible, sang louder 
than the larks, with high, shrill, whistling cries which make 
one feel cold and crouch low if they sing too close over- 
head. So the battle of guns went on, and troops, marching 
over dusty ground pock-marked with shell-craters, all white 
and barren, between belts of rusty wire, paid no heed to 
bursting crumps, and in the new-made craters or in old 
trenches, or in special holes just dug for shelter, sat down 
out of the wind and cooked their food, and slept so much 
like other bodies who will never wake, that once or twice I 
thought they were dead, these single figures sprawling in the 
dust, with sand-bags for their pillows. Away on the sky- 
line were a few dim towers faintly pencilled against the 
golden haze, and one taller than the others standing apart. 

"Douai," said a gunner officer. Yes ; it was Douai, old in 
history and full of ancient buildings, which hold many 
memories of faith and scholarship and peace. The tall, lone 
tower which I saw was the great belfry of Douai. It seemed 
very far away, with the German lines on this side of it ; but 
I remember how I used to see the clock-tower of Bapaume 
(no longer standing, alas!) as far and dim as this, so that 
it seemed as though we should never fight our way to it. 
But one day I walked into Bapaume with the Australian 
troops, who had entered it that morning. And so one day 
we may walk into Douai, if luck is with us. 

II 

The Battle of May 3 

May 3 
Another day of close, fierce, difficult fighting is now in 
progress, having begun early this morning in the darkness 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 177 

and going on down a long front in hot sunshine and dust 
and the smoke of innumerable shells. 

Among the battalions engaged were the Royal Scots, East 
Yorks, Shropshire Light Infantry, the Norfolks, Suffolks, 
East Kents and West Kents, Royal Fusiliers, East Surreys, 
Worcesters, Hampshires, King's Own Scottish Borderers, 
East Lanes and South Lanes, Gloucesters, Argylls, Sea- 
forths and Black Watch, and the Middlesex and London 
Regiments. They belonged to the 3rd, 12th, 37th, 29th, 
17th, 15th, and 56th Divisions. 

At many points our troops have succeeded in getting 
forward in spite of great resistance from fresh German 
legiments and intense artillery-fire. The most important 
gains of the day are in the direction of the village of 
Cherisy, where ground has been won by English battalions, 
and round Bullecourt by the Australians with Devons and 
Gordons on their left. 

This thrusts the enemy by Fontaine-lez-Croisilles, where 
he is still holding out, into a narrow pointed salient, which 
should be utterly untenable. The way to Cherisy was taken 
rapidly by men of the West Kents and East Surreys of the 
1 8th Division without any serious check, although there 
was savage machine-gun fire. At Fontaine-lez-Croisilles 
our men found it very difficult to get forward owing to the 
strength of the enemy's defences south of the wood, and an 
abominable barrage of heavy shell-fire. They bombed their 
way down 600 yards of trench, and established themselves 
round Fontaine Wood on the north-west side of the village. 

Farther north fighting carried our line out from Gue- 
mappe towards St.-Rohart Factory, just above Vis-en-Ar- 
tois, but signal rockets sent up here by our men may only 
come from advanced posts ahead of the main line. 

South of the Scarpe, between Monchy and those two 
woods of ill repute, the Bois du Vert and Bois du Sart, the 
battle has been similar to other struggles over the same 
ground, where the enemy stares across to our lines from 
good cover and has every inch of earth registered by his 



178 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

guns, with a clear field of fire for his machine-guns, of 
which he has got numbers in enfilade positions. English 
and Scottish battalions attacked here this morning, and 
would not give way under the terrific fire, but fought for- 
ward in small bodies until they gained the line on the crest 
of Infantry Hill and 300 yards short of the two woods, 
now linked together by the Germans with belts of wire and 
well-dug trenches. 

North of the River Scarpe there is great fighting round 
Roeux, Gavrelle, and Oppy by the Household Battalion, Sea- 
forths, Royal Irish Fusiliers, Warwicks, South African 
Scottish of the 4th, 9th, and 6th Divisions, and other Eng- 
lish and Scottish battalions. 

Gavrelle has already been the scene of many attacks and 
counter-attacks. It was here that in the fighting last month 
the enemy advanced time after time in close waves, only to 
be scythed down by our machine-guns, so that heaps of 
those field-grey dead lie out there on the barren land. To- 
day those dead were joined by many comrades. When our 
men advanced they were met by masses of Germans, and 
once more the line of battle had an ebb and flow, and both 
sides passed over the dead and wounded in assault and re- 
tirement. Four times an old windmill beyond the village 
changed hands. Four times the Germans who had dislodged 
our men were cut to pieces and thrust out. Men are fight- 
ing here as though these bits of brick and wood are worth a 
king's ransom or a world's empire, and in a way they are 
worth that, for the windmill of Gavrelle is one point which 
will decide- a battle or a series of battles upon which the 
fate of two Empires is at stake. So it happens in this war 
that a dust-heap like that other windmill at Pozieres in the 
crisis of the Somme battles becomes for hours or days the 
prize of victory or the symbol of defeat. 

In Oppy, above Gavrelle, which I described yesterday as 
I saw it in the golden haze, the Germans there, whom I 
could not see, have been very busy. They knew this attack 
was coming; it was clear that it must come to them, and at 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 179 

night they worked hard to protect themselves, fear being 
their taskmaster. They made machine-gun emplacements 
not only in pits and trenches, but in branches of many 
trees, and wired themselves in with many twisted strands. 
The Second Guards Reserve, newly brought up, held the 
village and wood and the white chateau, with its empty win- 
dows and broken roofs, and kept below the ground when 
our gun-fire stormed above them. So when our men at- 
tacked in that pale darkness of a May night they found 
themselves at once in a hail of machine-gun bullets, and later 
under shell-fire, which made a fury about them. They 
penetrated into Oppy Wood, but owing to the massed Ger- 
man troops, who counter-attacked fiercely, they did not go 
far into the wood or lose themselves in such a death-trap. 
They were withdrawn to the outskirts of Oppy, so that our 
guns could get at the enemy and drive him below ground 
again. 

Northwards we stormed and won long trenches running 
up from Oppy to Arleux, and most necessary for further 
progress, linking up with the Canadians, who made a great 
and successful attack upon the village of Fresnoy, just 
south of Acheville. 

That was certainly a very gallant feat in face of many 
difficulties of ground and most savage fire. They completely 
surrounded the village and caught its garrison in a trap 
from which they had no escape. After brief fighting with 
bombs and bayonets the survivors surrendered, to the num- 
ber of eight officers and about 200 men belonging to the 
Fifteenth Reserve Division of Prussians. What made them 
sick and sorry men is that two of their battalions had just 
arrived in high spirits, having troops in front of them who 
were weak, they had been told, and they were ordered to at- 
tack Arleux this morning. The Canadians attacked first, 
and by six o'clock these Prussians were sadder and wiser 
men. The prisoners escaped our shell-fire, but were nearly 
done to death behind our lines by their own guns. I saw this 
incident this morning. They had been put in an enclosure, 



180 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

next to a Canadian field dressing-station flying the Red 
Cross, when suddenly the enemy's guns began to shell the 
area with five-point-nines. They burst again and again 
during half an hour with tremendous crashes and smoke- 
clouds. 

"If those Germans are still there," said a Canadian, ''there 
won't be much left of them." 

When the shelling eased off I went towards their place 
but found it empty. As soon as the shelling started their 
guards hurried them away to safety farther back behind 
the lines, and the Canadian wounded were diverted to an- 
other route. One of these Prussian officers was shown his 
old lines captured on April 9, and he asked what regiment 
had done such gallant work. "The Canadians did it," he 
was told, "and the same fellows that captured Fresnoy this 
morning." The Prussian officer could hardly believe it, but 
when he was convinced of its truth he complimented the 
Canadian troops who had fought so hard and so far. They 
were proud young officers, and when I spoke to one or two 
they would not admit that they had been mastered in this 
war. They seem to have an unbounded faith in Hinden- 
burg's genius, and in the effects of submarine warfare. 

I found no such spirit among the non-commissioned of- 
ficers and men. They spoke as men under an evil spell, 
hating the war, but seeing no end to it. "Neither side will 
win," said one of them, "but who will stop it? The papers 
write about the conditions of peace, but one party says one 
thing and one party says another, and we don't know what 
to believe." ' 

I asked them about the Russian revolution, and whether 
it had any influence in the German trenches, but they seemed 
to have heard of it only as a vague, far-off event, not af- 
fecting their own lives and ideas. They were more in- 
terested about their food, and said their bread ration had 
been reduced by one-third. Behind the lines the scene of 
war to-day was on white, dusty plains under the glare of 
the sun, where men waiting to go into battle slept beside 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 181 

their arms, where mules kicked and rolled beside heavy bat- 
teries and transport. Guns were thundering close, and 
hostile shells were bursting among the tents and kinema 
pavilions, and a band was playing. No sane man would be- 
lieve it unless he saw it with his own eyes and heard it 
with his own ears, for it was all fantastic as a nightmare of 
war, with wounded men hobbling back from the bloody 
strife and wending their way through the old trenches, in 
which other men sat polishing rifles, or whistling in tune 
with the band. 

May 21 
Before darkness, when the shadows were lengthening 
across the fields and the glow of the evening sun was warm 
on the white walls of the French cottages, I went into an 
old village to meet some men who have just come out of 
the fires of hate. They were the East Kents of the 12th 
Division, whom I met last, months ago now, during the bat- 
tle of the Somme, where they had hard fighting and tragic 
losses. In the twilight and dusk and darkness I heard their 
tales of battle — the things these men had done just a little 
while ago before coming down to this village of peace — 
tales of frightful hours, of life in the midst of death, of 
English valour put to the most bloody and cruel tests. 

Men of Kent and boys of Kent. There was one boy with 
black eyes sitting with his tunic off on the window-sill above 
a terraced porch who seemed too young to be one of the 
King's officers, and is no more than nineteen, but ninety in 
the experience of life and death. He told me how he was 
sent up with some signallers to keep touch with his com- 
pany, who had gone forward in the attack at Monchy in the 
darkness before daybreak on the morning of May 3. He 
lost his way, as other men did, because of the darkness, 
and found his men being hit by machine-gun bullets. He 
put them into shell-holes, and worked from one hole to 
the other, dodging the heavy crumps which flung the earth 
up about them, and the more deadly sweep of bullets. When 



182 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the first glimmer of dawn came he met a man of his com- 
pany bringing down two prisoners, and heard that the ob- 
jective had been taken. It seemed good news and good evi- 
dence. The young officer pushed on with what men were 
with him, and presently saw a body of men ahead of him. 
Our fellows, he thought, and signalled to them. He thought 
it queer that they didn't answer his signals, but waved their 
caps in reply. He thought it more queer that they were 
wearing overcoats, and he was sure his company had gone 
forward without coats. But if those were not his men, 
where were they? That was where they ought to be, or 
farther forward. He went forward a little way, uneasy 
and doubtful, until all doubts were solved. Those men wav- 
ing caps to him, beckoning him forward, were Germans. 
The enemy had got behind our men, who were cut off. It 
was a narrow escape for this boy of nineteen, and he had 
others before he got back with a few men, sniped all the 
way by the enemy on the hill-side. It was worse for men 
who had been fighting forward there. They had gone 
over the ground quickly to the first goal, though many had 
lost their way in darkness and many had fallen. Then the 
enemy had dribbled in from positions on each side of them 
and closed up behind them. The East Kents were cut off, 
like other men of other regiments fighting alongside. Many 
officers were picked off by snipers or hit by shells and ma- 
chine-gun fire. Second lieutenants found themselves in 
command of companies, sergeants and corporals and pri- 
vates became leaders of small groups of men. The Buffs 
were cut off, but did not surrender. One young officer 
was the only one left with his company. He cheered up 
the men and said it was up to the Buffs to hold out as long 
as possible, and they built cover by linking up shell-holes 
and making a defensive position. Three times the enemy 
attacked in heavy numbers, determined to get their men, but 
each time they were beaten off by machine-gun fire and 
bombs. Fifteen hours passed like this, and then night came, 
and with it grave and dreadful anxiety to the officer with 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 183 

what remained of the company of men who looked to him 
for leadership. There were no more bombs. If another 
attack came, nothing could stop it. 

"We must fight our way back," said the second lieutenant. 
Between them and their own lines were two German 
trenches full of the enemy. It would not be easy to hack 
a way through. But the East Kents left their shell-holes, 
scrambled up into the open, and, with the second lieutenant 
leading, stumbled forward through the darkness as stealth- 
ily as possible to the German lines between them and our 
old positions. Then they sprang into the enemy's trench, 
bayoneting or clubbing the sentries. A German officer came 
out of a dug-out with a sword, which is an unusual weapon 
in a trench, but before he could use it our second lieutenant 
shot him with his revolver. So to the next trench, and so 
through again to a great escape. 

There were other officers and men who had to fight des- 
perately for life, like this. Young Kentish lads behaved 
with fine and splendid bravery. A private belonging to a 
machine-gun team remained alone in a shell-hole when all 
his comrades were killed, and stayed there for three days, 
keeping his gun in action until relieved by our advancing 
troops. Three days had passed when he rejoined his unit, 
and they, after a brief rest, were moving forward again to 
the front line. The escaped man was given the offer of 
remaining behind, but he said, "Thanks, but I'll go up along, 
with the rest of the chaps," and back he went. 

Another young private saw his company commander fall 
by his side. The stretcher-bearers had not yet come up to 
that spot, though all through the battle they did most noble 
work ; and this private soldier was desperate to get help for 
his officer. He resolved to make the enemy help him, and 
went forward to where he saw Germans. By some menace 
of death in his eyes, he quelled them — six of them — into 
surrender, and, bringing them back as prisoners, made them 
carry the young officer back to the dressing station, so sav- 
ing his life. I have told the story of the Buffs, or a brief 



184 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

glimpse of it, and they will forgive me when I add that 
what they have done has been done also by other English 
battalions, not with greater valour but with as great, in 
many battles and in these now being fought. Our English 
troops, through no fault of mine, get but little praise or fame 
though they are the backbone of the Army, and are in all 
our great attacks. The boys of England, like those of its 
garden county of Kent, have poured out their blood on these 
fields of France, and have filled the history of this appalling 
war with shining deeds. 

12 

Fields of Gold 

May 23 
The beauty of these May days is so intense and wonderful 
after the cold, grey weather and sudden rush of spring 
that men are startled by it, and find it outrageously cruel 
that death and blood and pain should be thrust into such a 
setting. Once in history two fat kings met in a field of 
France, between silken tents and on strips of tapestry laid 
upon the grass, so that this scene of glitter and shimmer 
was called for every age of schoolboys "The Field of the 
Cloth of Gold." Out here in France now there is a field of 
honour, stretching for more than a hundred miles, held by 
British soldiers; and that is a true field of cloth of gold, for 
everywhere behind the deep belt of cratered land, so barren 
and blasted that no seed of life is left in the soil, there are 
miles of ground where gold grows, wonderfully brilliant in 
the warm sunshine of these days. It is the gold of densely 
growing dandelions and of buttercups in great battalions. 
They cover the wreckage of old trenches, and bloom in 
patches of ground between powdered fragments of brick- 
and-stone-work which are still called by the names of old 
villages swept off the face of the earth by fierce bombard- 
ments. 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 185 

If you wish to picture our Army out here now, the land- 
scape in which our men are fighting — and they hke to think 
you want to do so — you must think of them marching 
along roads sweet-scented with lilac and apple-blossom, and 
over those golden fields to the white edge of the dead land. 
They are hot under heavy packs all powdered with dust, so 
that they wear white masks like a legion of Pierrots, and 
on their steel helmets the sun shines brazenly. But there 
is a soft breeze blowing, and as they march through old 
French villages showers of tiny white petals are blown 
upon them from the wayside orchards like confetti at a 
wedding feast, though it is for this dance of death called 
war. And these hot, dusty soldiers of ours, closed about by 
guns and mule teams and transport columns surging cease- 
lessly along the highways to the Front, drink in with their 
eyes cool refreshing shadows of green woods set upon hill- 
sides where the sun plays upon the new leaves with a melody 
of delicate colour-music, and spreads tapestries of light and 
shade across sweeps of grass-land all interwoven with the 
flowers of France. 

Our soldiers do not walk blindly through this beauty. It 
calls to them, these men of Surrey and Kent and Devon, 
these Shropshire lads and boys of the Derbyshire dales, and 
at night in their camps, before turning in to sleep in the 
tents, they watch the glow of the western sun and the fad- 
ing blue of the sky, and listen to the last song of birds tired 
with the joy of the day, and are drugged by the scent of 
closing flowers and of green wheat growing so tall, so quick- 
ly tall, behind the battlefields. These tents are themselves 
like flowers in the darkness when candlelight gleams through 
their canvas, and at night the scene of war is lit up by star- 
shells and vivid flashes of light as great shells fall and burst 
beyond the zone of tents, where British soldiers crouch 
in holes and burrow deep into the earth. It is under the 
blue sky of these days, and in this splendour of spring- 
time, that English boys and young Scots go into the fires 



186 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

of hell, where quite close to them the birds still sing, as I 
heard the nightingale amidst the crash of gun-fire. 

They were Shropshire lads of the King's Shropshire 
Light Infantry of the glorious 3rd Division, who helped to 
turn the tide of battle on one of these recent days when 
there was savage fighting through several days and nights. 
The officer in command of one of their companies found the 
ruined village of Tilloy-les-Mufflains in front of him still 
held by the enemy when our troops assaulted it. They were 
working their machine-guns and raking another body of in- 
fantry. 

"Come on, Shropshires," shouted the young officer, and 
his boys followed him. They worked round the flank of 
the village, cut off ninety of the enemy and captured them, 
and thereby enabled other troops to get forward. One of 
these Shropshire officers went out with only a few men 200 
yards beyond the front line that night, and took twenty 
prisoners in a dug-out there. 

Into that same village of Tilloy cleared by Shropshires 
an officer of the King's Own Liverpools, with a lance- 
corporal, dashed into a ruined house from which the enemy 
was sniping in a most deadly way, and brought out two of- 
ficers and twenty-eight men as prisoners. It was a subal- 
tern of the Suffolks who went out in daylight under fright- 
ful fire to reconnoitre the enemy's lines and brought back 
knowledge which saved many lives. On the night of May 
3, when all the sky was blazing with fire, it was the Royal 
Scots of the 3rd Division who held part of the line against 
heavy counter-attacks. The men had been fighting against 
great odds. Many of them had fallen, and the wounded 
were suffering horribly. Thirst tortured them, not only the 
wounded but also the unwounded, and there was no chance 
of water coming up through the hellish barrage. No chance 
except for the gallantry of the adjutant of the Royal Scots 
away back at battle headquarters near Monchy, where heavy 
crumps were bursting. He guessed his men craved for 
water, and he risked almost certain death to take it to them, 



THE BATTLE OF ARRAS 187 

going through all the fire with a few carriers and by a mira- 
cle untouched. This same adjutant went out again across 
the battle-ground under heavy fire to reorganize an ad- 
vanced signal-station where there were many dead and 
wounded, and all the lines were cut. It was a young sec- 
ond lieutenant of the Royal Fusiliers of the 3rd Division 
who took command of two companies when all the other 
officers had been killed or wounded, and so comforted the 
men that under his leadership they dug a line close to the 
German position east of Monchy, and all through the day 
and night of tragic fighting held it against strong attacks 
and under infernal shell-fire. Day after day, night after 
night, our men are fighting like that. And when for a little 
while they are relieved and given a rest they come back 
across those fields of the cloth of gold, beyond those barren 
fields where so many of their comrades lie, and look around 
and take deep breaths and say, "By Jove, what perfect 
weather!" and become a little drunk with the beauty of this 
world of life, and hate the thought of death. 



PART IV 
THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 

I 

Wytschaete and Messines 

June 7 
After the battle of Arras and all that fierce fighting which 
for two months has followed the capture of Vimy and the 
breaking of the Hindenburg line, and the taking of many 
villages, many prisoners, and many guns, by the valour and 
self-sacrifice of British troops, there began to-day at dawn 
another battle more audacious than that other one, because 
of the vast strength of the enemy positions, and more stun- 
ning to the imagination because of the colossal material 
of destructive force gathered behind our assaulting troops. 
It is the battle of Messines. 

It is my duty to write the facts of it, and to give the pic- 
ture of it. That is not easy to a man who, after seeing the 
bombardments of many battles, has seen just now the appal- 
ling vision of massed gun-fire enormously greater in inten- 
sity than 'any of those, whose eyes are still dazed by a sky 
full of blinding lights and flames, and who has felt the 
tremor of earthquakes shaking the hill-sides, when suddenly, 
as a signal, the ground opened and mountains of fire rose 
into the clouds. There are no words which will help the 
imagination here. Neither by colour nor language nor 
sound could mortal man reproduce the picture and the 
terror and the tumult of this scene. 

Our troops are now fighting forward through smoke and 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 



189 



mist — English regiments, New-Zealanders, Protestant and 
Catholic Irishmen. Their Divisions from north to south 
were the 23rd, 47th (London), 41st, 19th, i6th (Irish), 
36th (Ulster), 25th, New-Zealand, and 3rd Australian 



ji^^t- 




LINE BEFORE THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 



They are fighting shoulder to shoulder in an invisible world, 
from which they are sending up light signals to show the 
progress they have made to the eyes of men flying high 
above the storm of battle, and to watchers in the country 
from which they went just as the faint rays of dawn flushed 
a moonlight sky. They have made good progress up the 
slopes of Wytschaete and Messines. Prisoners are already 



190 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

coming back with tales of how our men swept over them 
and beyond. So far it seems that the day goes well for us, 
but it is early in the day, and I must write later of what 
happens later on that ridge hidden behind the drifting clouds 
of smoke. 

For two and a half years the Messines Ridge had been 
a curse to all our men who have held the Ypres salient — 
a high barrier against them, behind which the enemy stacked 
his guns, shooting at them every kind of explosive, di- 
rected upon these troops of ours in the swamps of the 
Douve, in the broken woods of Ploegsteert, in all the fiat 
ground north and west of Kemmel, by German observing 
officers very watchful behind their telescopes on that high 
ground which rises up from Wytschaete to Messines. In 
the early days of the war, before the enemy's grey legions 
had swept down through Belgium in a great devastating 
tide, some of our artillery and our cavalry rode along the 
hog's back of the ridge and held it for a time against the 
enemy's advanced patrols. On November i, 19 14, some of 
our guns were parked in the market square of Warneton be- 
yond the ridge, and on the next day found a good target 
in German cavalry attacking from the woods, and held their 
fire until these mounted men were within a thousand yards 
of them, when riders and horses fell under a merciless storm 
of shrapnel. Many Germans died that day, but behind 
them was the vast army which came on like a rolling sea, 
beating back our ten divisions — those first ten wonderful 
divisions who fought against overwhelming odds and 
massed artillery which gave them no kind of chance. So 
we lost Wytschaete — Whitesheet, as our men have always 
called it — and the Messines Ridge, and not all our efforts 
could get it back again. 

It is more than two years ago now — it was in March of 
iQi^ — ^that I saw an attack on Wytschaete, the first of our 
British bombardments which I watched after adventures in 
Belgium and France. Standing upon the same ground to- 
day, looking across the same stretch of battlefield, watching 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 191 

another attack up those frightful slopes, I thought back to 
that other day, upon that early demonstration of our artil- 
lery covering an infantry advance, and the remembrance 
was amazing in its contrast to this new battle in the dawn. 
Then our shrapnel barrage was a pretty ineffective thing — 
terrible as it seemed to me at the time. In those two years 
our gun-power has been multiplied enormously — by vast 
numbers of heavy guns and monstrous howitzers, and great 
quantities of field-guns — so that at daybreak this morning, 
before our men rose from their trenches to go forward in 
assault, the enemy's country up there was upheaved by a 
wild tornado of shell-fire, and the contours of the land were 
changed, and the sky opened and poured down shrieking 
steel, and the earth was torn and let forth flame. 

This battle of ours has started with such preparations as 
to ensure all but that last certainty of success which belongs 
to the incalculable fortune of war. It is not an exaggeration 
to say that they began a year ago, when miners began to 
tunnel under the slopes of Wytschaete and Messines, and 
laid enormous charges of ammonal, which at a touch on this 
day should blow up the hill-sides and alter the very geog- 
raphy of France. For a year Sir Herbert Plumer and his 
staff prepared their plans for this attack, gathered their 
material, and studied every detail of this business of great 
destruction. While other armies were fighting in the 
Somme, and all the world watched their conflict, the Sec- 
ond Army held the salient quietly, always on the defen- 
sive, not asking for more trouble than they had. They 
waited for their own offensive, and trained their own troops 
for it. A week ago they were ready, with railways, guns. 
Tanks, every kind of explosive, every kind of weapon which 
modern science has devised for the killing of men in great 
masses. A week ago all the guns that had been massing 
let loose their fire. Night and day for seven days it has 
continued with growing violence, working up to the su- 
preme heights of fury as dawn broke to-day. For five 
days at least many Germans were pinned to their tunnels as 



192 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

prisoners of fire. No food reached them ; there was no way 
out through these zones of death, A new regiment which 
tried to come up last night was broken and shattered. A 
prisoner says that out of his own company he lost fifty to 
sixty men before reaching the line. For a long way behind 
the line our heavy guns laid down belts of shell-fire, and 
many of the enemy's batteries kept silent 

Our gunners smothered his batteries whenever he re- 
vealed them to the airmen. Those flying men have been 
wonderful. A kind of exaltation of spirits took possession 
of them, and they dared great risks and searched out the 
enemy's squadrons far over his lines. In five days from 
Jime I forty-four separate machines were sent crashing 
down, and this morning, very early, flocks of aeroplanes 
went out to blind the enemy's eyes and report the progress 
of battle. In the darkness queer monsters moved up close to 
our lines, many of them crawling singly over the battlefields 
under cover of woods and ruins. They were the Tanks, 
ready to go into action on a great day of war, when their 
pilots and crews have helped by high courage to victory. 

Last night all was ready. Men knowing the risks of it 
all — for no plans are certain in war — had a sense of oppres- 
sion, strained by poignant anxiety. Many men's lives were 
on the hazard of all this. The air was heavy, as though 
nature itself were full of tragedy. A summer fog was 
thick over Flanders, and the sky was livid. Forked light- 
ning rent the low clouds, and thunder broke with menacing 
rumblings. Rain fell sharply, and on the conservatory of 
a big Flemish house where officers bent over their maps and 
plans the rain-drops beat noisily. But the storm passed 
and the night was calm and beautiful. Along the dark 
roads, and down the leafy lanes, columns of men were 
marching, and brass bands played them through the dark- 
ness. Guns and gun-limbers moved forward at a sharp 
pace. "Lights out" rang the challenges of the sentries to 
the staff cars passing beyond the last village where any 
gleam was allowed, and nearer to the lines masses of men 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 193 

lay sleeping or resting in the fields before getting orders 
to go forward into the battle zone. All through the night 
the sky was filled with vivid flashes of bursting shells and 
with steady hammer-strokes of guns, and from an observa- 
tion-post looking across the shoulder of Kemmel Hill, 
straight to Wytschaete and the Messines Ridge, I watched 
this bombardment and waited for that moment when it 
should rise into a mad fury of gun-fire before our men 
lying in these dark fields should stumble forward. During 
those hours of waiting in the soft warm air of the night I 
thought of all I had heard of the position in front of us. 
"It's a Gibraltar," said an officer who was there in the early 
days of the war. "The enemy .will fight his hardest for the 
Messines Ridge," said another officer, whose opinion 
has weight. "He has stacks of guns against us." Such 
thoughts made one shiver, though the night was warm, so 
warm and moist that wafts of scent came up from the earth 
and bushes. A full moon had risen, veiled by vapours until 
they drifted by and revealed all her pale light in a sky that 
was still faintly blue, with here and there a star. The moon 
through all her ages never looked down upon such fires 
of man-made hell as those which lashed out when the bom- 
bardment quickened. That was just before three o'clock. 
For two hours before that fires had been lighted in the Ger- 
man lines by British shell-fire — big rose-coloured smoke- 
clouds with hearts of flame — and all round the salient and 
the Messines Ridge our guns flashed redly as they fired, 
and their shell-bursts scattered light against which the trees 
were etched sharply. I could hear the rattle of gun- wagons 
along the distant roads, and the tuff-tuff of an engine driv- 
ing very close up to the firing-lines, and above the great 
loudness of our gun-fire the savage whine of German shrap- 
nel coming over in quick volleys. The drone of a night- 
flying aeroplane passed overhead. The sky lightened a lit- 
tle, and showed black smudges like ink-blots on blue silk 
cloth where our kite-balloons rose in clusters to spy out the 
first news of the coming battle. The cocks of Flanders 



194. FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

crowed, and two heavy German shells roared over Kemmel 
Hill and burst somewhere in our lines. A third came, but 
before its explosion could be heard, all the noise there had 
been, all these separate sounds of guns and high explosives 
and shrapnel were swept up into the tornado of artillery 
which now began. 

The signal for its beginning was the most terribly beauti- 
ful thing, the most diabolical splendour, I have seen in war. 

Out of the dark ridges of Messines and Wytschaete and 
that ill-famed Hill 60, for which many of our best have died, 
there gushed out and up enormous volumes of scarlet flame 
from the exploding mines and of earth and smoke, all 
lighted by the flame, spilling over into fountains of fierce 
colour, so that all the countryside was illumined by red light. 
Where some of us stood watching, aghast and spellbound by 
this burning horror, the ground trembled and surged vio- 
lently to and fro. Truly the earth quaked. A New Zealand 
boy who came back wounded spoke to me about his own 
sensations. '*I felt like being in an open boat on a rough 
sea. It rocked up and down this way and that." 

Thousands of British soldiers were rocked like that be- 
fore they scrambled up and went forward to the German 
lines — forward beneath that tornado of shells which 
crashed over the enemy's ground with a wild prolonged 
tumult just as day broke, with crimson feathers unfolding 
in the eastern sky, and flights of airmen following other 
flights above our heroes. 

Rockets rose from the German lines — distress signals 
flung v.-^ by men who still lived in that fire zone — white and 
red and green. They were calling to their gunners, warning 
them that the British were upon them. Their high lamps 
were burning as lost hopes in God or man, and then falling 
low and burning out. Presently there were no more of 
them, but others which were ours in places which had been 
German. Smoke drifted across and mingled with the morn- 
ing mist. One could see nothing but a bank of fog thrust 
through with short stars of light. The first definite news 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 195 

that I had was from German prisoners, who came down 
in batches, carrying our wounded when any help was needed 
for our own stretcher-bearers. They described how our 
men came close behind the barrage, some of them, by a kind 
of miracle, in advance of the barrage. The Germans had 
not expected the attack for another two days, and last night 
were endeavouring to relieve some of their exhausted troops 
by new divisions, the 3rd Bavarians relieving the 24th Sax- 
ons, and the 104th Infantry Reserve the 23rd Bavarians. 
They lost heavily on the way up to the lines by our fire, and 
were then, after a few hours, attacked by our waves of 
infantry. 

The story of this great battle and great victory — for it is 
really that — cannot be told in a few lines, and it is too soon 
yet to give exact details of the fighting. But from the re- 
ports that have now come in from all parts of the battle 
front it is good enough to know that everywhere our men 
have succeeded with astonishing rapidity, and that the plan 
of battle has been fulfilled almost to the letter and to the 
time-table. The New-Zealanders reached and captured Mes- 
sines in an hour and forty minutes after the moment of 
attack, in spite of heavy fighting in German trenches, where 
many of the enemy were killed. Irish troops. Nationalists 
and Ulstermen, not divided in politics on the battlefield, 
but vying with each other in courage and self-sacrifice, 
stormed their way up to Wytschaete, and after desperate re- 
sistance from the enemy captured all that is left of the fa- 
mous White Chateau, which for years our soldiers have 
watched through hidden glasses as a far high place like the 
castle of a dream. By midday our men were well down 
farther slopes of the ridge, while our field-batteries rushed 
up the ridge behind them to take up new positions. Farther 
north along the shoulder of the Ypres salient our English 
troops of the 19th, 41st, 47th, and 23rd Divisions advanced 
along a line including Battle Wood, south of Zillebeke, and 
now hold all but a small part of it. Meanwhile the Germans 
are massing troops at Warneton and its neighbourhood, as 



196 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

though preparing a heavy counter-attack, and are shelling 
Messines Ridge with some violence. For to-day at least, 
in spite of fierce fighting that must follow, our men have 
achieved a victory, with light losses considering the severity 
of their task. The evil spell of the Ypres salient is broken. 
The salient itself is wiped out, and if we can hold the Mes- 
sines Ridge, Ypres and its countryside will no longer exact 
that toll of death which for nearly three years has been a 
curse to us. The roads and fields are under a glare of sun- 
shine as I write, and down them, through the dust and the 
fierce heat, come troops of German prisoners, exhausted and 
nerve-broken, but glad of life. And passing them come the 
walking wounded who attacked them in their tunnels at 
dawn to-day and conquered. The lightly wounded men are 
happy and proud of their victory. 

"We New-Zealanders can afford to be a little cocky," 
said one of these bronzed fellows with eyes of cornflower 
blue. "My word, I'm glad we had the luck." He was 
wounded in the foot, but the man just hugged the news 
of victory. "We shall be no end stuck up," he said, and then 
he laughed in a simple way, and said, "I'm glad New Zea- 
land did so well — that's natural. But they tell me the Irish 
were splendid, and the Australians could not be held back. 
It's good to have done the job, and I hope it will help on 
the end." 

That New-Zealander spoke the thought of thousands who 
have been fighting in this battle. They have a right to be 
proud of themselves, for they have broken the curse of the 
salient and relieved it of some of its horror. 



The Spirit of Victory 

June 8 
I HAVE never seen the spirit of victory so real and so 
visible among great bodies of British troops since this war 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 197 

began. It shines in the eyes of our officers and men to-day 
up in the fighting zone and in the fields and woods below 
Wytschaete and Messines, where they are resting and sleep- 
ing after the battle, regardless of the great noise of gun-fire 
which is still about them. Our men have a sense of great 
achievement, something big and definite and complete, in 
this capture of Messines Ridge. They knew how formi- 
dable it was to attack, and they count their cost — the price 
of victory — as extraordinarily light. Many brave men have 
fallen, and along the roads come many ambulances where 
prone figures lie with their soles up as a reminder that no 
battle may be fought .^ithout this traffic flowing back ; but 
the proportion of 4^ighTy wounded was high and the number 
of wounded amazingly low among most battalions. I met 
one company of Irish Fusiliers to-day who took their goal 
without a single casualty and marched into Wytschaete 
without firing a shot. That was a rare episode. But on all 
sides I hear astonishment that our losses were so small con- 
sidering the immensity of their task. It is this which makes 
the men glad of victory — not having it clouded by such 
heavy sacrifices of life as in the battles of the Somme. 
"We got off light," said an Irish boy to-day; "we had the 
best of luck." 

All along the way to Wytschaete, where I went through 
places which two days ago still lived up to the reputation of 
evil names — Suicide Corner, V. C. Walk, Shell Farm — and 
in woods like the Bois de Rossignol, where the death-birds 
came screaming until a moment before yesterday's dawn, 
officers and men, generals, brigadiers, sergeants, privates, 
spoke of victory with an enthusiasm that made their eyes 
alight. An officer reined in his horse and leaned over his 
saddle to speak to me. "It was a great day for Ireland," 
he said. Yesterday another man, with an arm in a sling, 
also used the words "a great day," but said, "It's a great 
day for New Zealand," And another officer, speaking of the 
way in which all our men went forward to victory, Eng- 
lish troops advancing with their old unbroken courage in 



198 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

spite of hard fighting through a year of war, said : "This 
is the best thing our armies have ever done, the most com- 
plete and absolute success. It all went like clockwork." 

One great proof of victory is the relief of some of those 
deadly places in the salient under direct observation from 
Messines Ridge — screens of foliage which I passed to-day 
are no longer needed, and one may walk openly in places 
where German eyes had been watching for men to kill for 
two years and a half. And another proof, written in hu- 
man figures, is one huge mass after another of German 
prisoners, a thousand or more in each assembling place in 
the fields along the roadsides. They were lying and stand- 
ing to-day in the sunshine, with coloured handkerchiefs tied 
above their heads, many of them stripped to the waist to air 
their shirts, some still wearing their heavy shrapnel hel- 
mets with sackcloth covering, all drowsed with fatigue and 
the prolonged strain of our shell-fire, so that they sleep 
with heads on knees or lying as though dead in huddled pos- 
tures. They wake at intervals, asking for water, and then 
sleep again. There are such crowds of these field-grey men 
that they are astounded by their own numbers, and when 
questioned speak gloomily of the doom that is upon their 
rule. 

"What do you think of it all ?" asked an Irish officer of a 
German officer whom he captured in Wytschaete village. 
The man shook his head and said in good English, *'We are 
done for." Another officer taken by English troops on the 
northern sector of the attack was frank in revealing his 
tragic thoughts when he heard the mines go up. He thought, 
so he says, "Thank Heaven the British are attacking. Now 
I can surrender. Yesterday my division had three good 
regiments, now they do not exist. This attack ought to end 
the war." Let us not base too much optimistic belief on 
such words by German prisoners. 

In that northern part of the attack by the London bat- 
talions of the 47th and the Yorkshires and other English 
troops of the 23rd Division, who started near Triangle 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 199 

Wood, there was bad ground for assembly before the battle 
known as the Mud-Patch. There were no trenches there, 
and our lads had to lie out all night in the open without 
any cover from the shell-fire. It seemed that the Germans 
saw them, and their commanding officer was in a fever 
of anxiety, thinking they were discovered and would be 
shelled to death. But, as though expecting a raid from one 
point, the enemy only barraged round a group of mine- 
craters, from which our men had been withdrawn, because 
their shafts were packed with explosives ready to be touched 
off at dawn. In one mine-crater held by the Germans a 
shaft ran underneath called the Berlin Shaft — the way to 
Berlin, according to the Australians who dug it months 
ago. Above it was a half-company of Germans, and when 
the mine was blown at dawn not a man escaped. Beyond 
was the Damstrasse, where the enemy had deep trenches 
and strong emplacements in the hollow, so that our Generals 
were afraid of trouble here, but when our men came to it 
they found nothing but frightful ruin, obliterating all the 
trenches and redoubts, and the ^men who still lived there 
shouted: "Don't shoot, don't shoot, Kamerad!" 

The taking of Wytschaete by the Irish Nationalists, with 
Ulster men next to them, was one of the great episodes of 
the battle, vying with the exploit of the men of New Zea- 
land in carrying Messines Ridge. I went among them to- 
day up there by Wytschaete Wood across our old trenches 
and by "the great wall of China," built a few months ago as 
a barrier — a wonderful place of sand-bag defences and 
deep dug-outs. Not much is left of Wytschaete Wood, 
once 800 yards square, now a pitiful wreckage of broken 
stumps and tattered tree-trunks. The slopes of the ridge 
are all barren and tortured with shell-fire like the Vimy 
Ridge, and across it unceasingly went flights of heavy shells, 
droning loudly as they passed over the crest, and with all 
our heavy howitzers firing with thunderous ear-stunning 
strokes. But the Irish soldiers paid no heed to this noise of 
gun-fire, for the enemy was answering back hardly at all. 



200 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and the battle-line had gone forward. An Irish major 
was asleep under a little bit of a copse within a few yards 
of a 6-in. howitzer, splitting the heavens with its sharp 
crack of sound, and he slept in his socks as sweetly as a 
babe in the cradle until wakened to speak to me, which 
made me sorry, because he had earned his rest. But he sat 
up smiling, and glad to talk of his Irish boys, who had done 
gloriously. Away off near a sinister little wood, where 
many men have died in the old days, sat the brigadier of the 
Irish troops, the South and West Country Irish who went 
through Wytschaete Wood and took the village. "Go and 
see my boys up in their trenches," he said; "they will tell 
you all they have done, and it was well done. Old Ireland 
has done great things." 

The boys, as he called them, though some are old sol- 
diers who fought at Suvla Bay, and the youngest of them 
are old in war and remember as far back in history as the 
days when they stormed through Guillemont and Ginchy, 
were sitting with German caps on their heads, and examin- 
ing German machine-guns, and sorting all their souvenirs 
of battle. I talked with many of them, and they told their 
adventures of yesterday with a touch of Irish humour and 
a sparkle in their eyes. It was the little things of battle 
which they remembered most; the rations and soda-water 
they found in German dug-outs ; the way they groped around 
for souvenirs as soon as they gained their ground. But 
stupendous still in their imagination was the drum-fire of 
our guns and the explosion of the mines. 

"As soon as the barrage began," said an Irish sergeant 
of the Munsters, "a mine only a few hundred yards away 
from us at Maedelstede Farm went up, and we went down. 
The ground rocked under us, and fire rushed up to the sky. 
The fumes came back on to us and made us dizzy, but we — 
the Royal Irish and the Munsters — went on to Petit-Bois 
Wood, and then to Wytschaete Wood, and other Irish lads 
passed through us to the attack on the village." 

The only trouble was in and about the wood. In the cen- 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 201 

tre of it was a small body of Germans, with a machine-gun, 
who held out stubbornly and swept the Irish with fire. But 
they were destroyed, and the attack swept on. There was 
another post hereabout, in which a party of Germans held 
out with rifle-fire. An Irish officer of a famous old family 
led an attack on this, and fell dead with a bullet in his brain 
at five yards range, but a sergeant with him, whom I met 
to-day, helped to surround the enemy, and this hornets' nest 
was routed out. A German officer had climbed a tree, and 
in the coolest possible way signalled with his hand to his 
men beyond. An Irishman brought him down, and made 
him a prisoner. 

Wytschaete village was a fortress position, with machine- 
gun emplacements made for defence on all sides, but the 
Irish closed round it and captured it easily. The garrison 
was demoralized by prolonged shell-fire, which had made a 
clean sweep of the hospice ruins and the church and chateau, 
and every blade of grass above their tunnels. "I am an old 
soldier," said one of their officers, "and I hate to be a 
prisoner, but human nature cannot stand the strain of such 
bombardments." 

On the right of Irish Nationalists fought the Ulstermen, 
keeping in absolute line with their comrades-in-arms, in 
friendly rivalry with them to give glory to Ireland. They 
advanced through Spanbeckmolen, a fortress position 
through Hell Wood, to the top of Wytschaete Ridge, and it 
is curious that these two bodies of Irish troops had an 
almost identical experience. The South and West Country 
Irishmen of Dublin and Munster took looo prisoners. So 
did the Ulstermen. When the Catholic Irishmen were 
shaken by the mine explosion a whole company of Germans 
was hurled high in its eruption, and this awful fate hap- 
pened to another company of Germans in front of the 
Ulstermen. Without thought of old strife at home, these 
men fought side by side and are proud of each other. Their 
Irish blood has mingled, and out of it some spirit of healing 
and brotherhood should come because of this remembrance. 



202 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

An Irish soldier poet has made a new version of "The 
Wearing of the Green," inspired by the guns that wear 
green jackets of fohage and cover the advance of the Irish 
brigade. I heard some of the verses this morning : 

They love the old division in the land the boys come from, 
And they're proud of what they did at Loos and on the 

Somme, 
If by chance we all advance to Whitesheet and Messines, 
They'll know the guns that strafe the Huns were wearing 

of the green. 

Wytschaete and Messines are safe in our hands, and our 
troops are far on the other side. A party of the enemy is 
holding out in Battle Wood, but that will not be for long, 
and is only a small episode. To-day and yesterday German 
troops massed at Warneton, as though for a counter-attack, 
but each time were scattered by our guns. From our new 
ridge, so long an evil barrier against us, we have observa- 
tion on them, and the tables are turned. 



After the Earthquake 

June 9 
The ground gained by our troops in the great battle of 
Messines remains firmly in our hands, and enemy attempts 
to counter-attack have been broken by our artillery, in most 
cases before the German troops have been able to advance. 
Last evening shortly before dusk of another day of bril- 
liant sunshine, almost too' hot for our men in shadeless 
country of the battlefields, SOS signals all along the line 
gave warning of German endeavours to thrust back our new 
front line far beyond the Messines Ridge, and away north 
of St.-Eloi on the old line of the Ypres salient, now by our 
victory no longer a salient. 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 203 

Our gunners got to work again, in spite of a night-and- 
day strain for more than a week, and for several hours there 
was another tremendous bombardment from all our heavies 
and field-guns, watched for miles around by Flemish peas^ 
ants sitting outside their windmills and outside cottage 
doors, looking at this lightning in the sky, which is a revela- 
tion to them of the mighty growth of that British Army 
since those early days when a few divisions and a few guns 
came to these fields of Flanders and fought tO' a thin, ragged 
line round Ypres. In many cases the rockets which rose 
from our lines last night calling for the help of the gunners 
were hardly needed, for though the enemy was seen to be 
assembling, he did not try to break through our barrage. 
In many places massed bodies of his men were caught round 
Warneton by this new storm of fire which burst upon them, 
and the night scenes behind the German lines must have 
been full of terror and tragedy for those poor wretches 
urged forward along the roads ploughed up by our shells. 
Only at Klein Zillebeke, on the northern flank of our battle- 
line, did they gain a temporary footing, and many of them 
lie dead there after the fierce fighting which is still in prog- 
ress. 

It is no wonder that, after such experiences of our gun- 
fire, the German prisoners show no regret at being in Brit- 
ish hands. I saw new batches of them to-day, mopped up 
last night as an aftermath of the battle, young boys and 
middle-aged men, all very sturdy and strong and aston- 
ishingly clean after their escape from the tumult of that 
frightful ground by Wytschaete and Messines. They 
stretched themselves in the sunshine, and took their ease 
in green fields, drinking quarts of water provided by their 
guards. It is not with resignation but with joy that they 
find themselves on our side of the lines, away from all that 
horror of the fire zone. 

"Now we shall go on leave," they said to one of our of- 
ficers; "we are sick of this war." He spoke to two Ger- 
man boys who have been fighting for a year, and are now 



204 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

only seventeen and look much younger. "You ought to be 
spanked and sent home to your mothers," he said. They 
laughed, and said: "That is what we should like, sir, if 
you please." 

All the prisoners are extraordinarily ignorant of the 
feeling of hatred they have aroused against them in the 
world, and expect that they should be admired for the way 
they have fought. But they want the war to end quickly, 
and the rank and file do not seem to mind very much whether 
it ends by a German victory or German defeat, so that it 
ends somehow. One human being, shattered in nerves, half 
senseless, was dragged back after Hill 60 was mined, and 
he said that he had seen only two men of his company after 
the great explosion. All the others had been hurled sky- 
high by the flames and gases, or buried in the fall of earth. 

The work of this mining under the German lines has been 
carried on for a year or more by a number of tunnelling 
companies from Australia, New Zealand, and our own min- 
ing districts. It was hard, dangerous toil, for the enemy 
was down counter-mining, and there were frightful mo- 
ments when the men who heard the working of picks very 
close to them had to be rushed out lest they should be blown 
into the next world. Their own work was done quickly 
lest the enemy should discover the secret of these borings 
beneath their lines before the ammonal with which they were 
packed was detonated on the morning of the battle. It 
was in darkness that the miners relieved each other lest 
enemy aircraft or eyes that always stared down from the 
ridges shguld see and suspect. Some of our English troops 
took Hill 60 after this explosion, which flung some of them 
to the ground as they rose at the signal of attack. From 
the craters they dragged that dazed and terror-stricken 
officer, who had lost all his company after that vibration 
of an electric wire in contact with hellish forces. 

Just south of these men, astride the Ypres-Comines 
Canal, a number of London battalions of the 47th Division 
were fighting forward to the ruins of the famous White 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 205 

Chateau, south of the canal, on the west of Hollebeke. It 
is the Chateau Matthieu, once a noble mansion, with a park 
in which a stream flowed from a lake to the canal, and fine 
stables south of the lake, surrounded by woods. For more 
than a year only ruins of the chateau stood, and the wood 
was like all these woods of war, lopped and torn by shell-fire, 
with black, dead limbs. Some of the London men were 
having a hard fight north of the canal in face of machine- 
gun fire sweeping them from two triangular spoil-banks, as 
they are called, where earth from the canal sides has been 
stacked, forming strong points for the enemy above their 
tunnelled defences. They took one of these heaps of earth 
with eighty prisoners, but fell back from the other holding 
the canal bank opposite White Chateau, where their com- 
rades, London men all, were fighting heavily. The Ger- 
mans here did not yield without a desperate resistance. A 
company and a half of men held the ruins of the chateau, 
and flung out bombs to keep our assaulting troops at bay. A 
gallant platoon crept round the chateau walls, and hurled 
bombs over these bits of brickwork, and after some time 
of this fighting the enemy hoisted a white flag of surrender, 
and sixty prisoners, survivors of this garrison, were taken. 
The Londoners still had a hard way to go across the stream 
from the lake, twenty feet broad at points, and past the 
stables and through the old stumps of the wood, but they 
kept to the time-table of the battle and added 450 prisoners 
to the great captures of the day. It was an historic day 
in the record of the London men of the 47th Division, who 
have fought with such glorious valour since they first came 
out to France. 

June io 
On the right of the London troops were some English 
county regiments of the 41st Division — the 60th Rifles 
(King's Royal Rifles), West Kents, and others — men who 
fought a great battle in the Somme fields that day when a 
Tank waddled up the high street of Flers with cheering men 
behind. 



206 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

On the night of June 6 they lay by St.-Elol, in the salient 
opposite the Mound, a famous heap of earth taken over by 
the glorious old 3rd Division, and lost when the Canadians 
were violently attacked a year ago. This mound had been 
cratered by deep mines in those bad old days of fighting, 
but the enemy did not know that new shafts had been tun- 
nelled under them, and that explosive forces enormously 
greater than in the first mines were about to be touched off. 
When the metal discs were fired by tunnelling officers the 
sound of thousands of our men cheering with the wild mad- 
ness of enthusiasm could be heard even above the deafen- 
ing uproar of the explosions. Then waves of riflemen ran 
forward, round the vast craters that had been flung open 
and across the first line of German trenches, frightfully up- 
heaved and shattered. There were not many living Ger- 
mans here, and they were dazed by the shock and terror of 
the mines and made no kind of fight. Beyond them was a 
strong place known as the Damstrasse, a street of concrete 
houses built of great blocks six feet thick, and so enormously 
solid that not even heavy shell-bursts could do much damage 
to them. This position had given great anxiety to our of- 
ficers, who knew its strength, but as it happened, the vio- 
lence of our shell-fire was so amazing that many of these 
blockhouses were blown in, and the garrison of Damstrasse 
was utterly cowed, so that they were captured by hundreds. 

The King's Royal Rifles pressed forward into the fright- 
ful chaos of country, with charred tree-trunks, upturned 
trenches, rubbish-heaps which had been German strong 
points, and a litter of machine-guns, twisted wire, bomb 
stores, and dead bodies. The first check came outside the 
ruin of an estaminet, in which a party of Germans, with 
machine-guns and rifles, determined to sell their lives dearly. 
They poured fire into our men, who suffered a good many 
casualties here, but would not be baulked, whatever the 
cost. They took what cover they could, and used their 
rifles to riddle the place with shot. One by one the Ger- 
mans fell, and their fire slackened. Then the Rifles charged 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 207 

the ruins and captured all those who still remained alive. 
Fresh waves of men came up and went forward into Ravine 
Wood, with its tattered trunks and litter of broken branches. 
Here there was another fight, very fierce and bloody, be- 
tween some of the West Kents and German soldiers of the 
35th Division who attempted a strong counter-attack. The 
men of Kent had their bayonets fixed, and at a word from 
their officers they made a quick, grim dash at the Germans, 
advancing upon them through the dead wood with their 
bayonets ready also, so that the morning sun gleamed upon 
all this steel. The bayonets crossed. The men of Kent 
went through the enemy thrusting and stabbing, but though 
they saw red in that hour they gave quarter to men who 
dropped their rifles and cried "Kamerad!" Twenty-five 
prisoners were taken in that encounter, and over 800 pris- 
oners were taken between the Mound and Ravine Wood 
before the day was done, with a great store of booty, includ- 
ing eight trench-mortars and nearly thirty machine-guns, 
though many more lie buried in this ground, and two search- 
lights and sacks of letters from German soldiers to their 
homes. The enemy's losses hereabouts were very heavy. An 
officer taken prisoner said his own company had been re- 
duced to thirty men before the battle began owing to our 
bombardment. Many of their batteries were knocked out, 
and the gunners lie dead before them. Several Tanks came 
up to share in the fight, and climbed over all this broken 
ground, but did not find much work to do as the strong 
parts had been knocked out. 

The completeness of this victory, the march through of 
our troops, the utter despair of the German troops, was 
due in an overwhelming way to the guns, and the gun- 
ners who served them. It is only right and just that 
the highest tribute should be paid to these men, who have 
worked day and night for nearly a fortnight, under the 
intense strain, in an infernal noise, without sleep enough 
to relieve the nerve-rack, and always in danger of death. 
Gunner officers are hoarse with shouting under fire. They 



208 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

are hollow-eyed with bodily and mental exhaustion. The 
ammunition-carriers worked themselves stiff in order to 
feed the guns. They have used up incredible numbers of 
shells. The gunners of one division alone fired 180,000 
shells with their field-batteries, and over 46,000 with their 
heavies. On the same scale has been the ammunition ex- 
penditure of all other groups of guns. 

An historic scene took place after our troops had gained 
the. high ground of Wytschaete and Messines. An order 
passed along to all the batteries. Gun horses were standing 
by. They were harnessed to the guns. The limbers of the 
field-batteries lined up. Then half-way through the battle 
the old gun positions were abandoned, after two and a half 
years of stationary warfare in the salient, searched every 
day of that time by German shells fired by direct observation 
from that ground just taken. The drivers urged on their 
horses. They drove at a gallop past old screens, and out 
of camouflaged places where men had walked stealthily, and 
dashed up the slopes. The infantry stood by to let them 
pass, and from thousands of men, these dusty, hot, parched 
soldiers of ours, who were waiting to go forward in support 
of the first waves of assaulting troops, there rose a great 
following cheer, which swept along the track of the gun- 
ners, and went with them up the ridge, where they imlim- 
bered and got into action again for the second phase of the 
fighting down the farther slopes. 

As scouts of the gunners, as their watchers and signallers, 
were the boys of the Royal Flying Corps. I said yesterday 
that they were uplifted with a kind of intoxication of en- 
thusiasm. A youthful madness took possession of them. 
Those squadrons which I saw flying overhead while it was 
still dark on Thursday morning did daredevil, reckless, al- 
most incredible things. They flew as men inspired by pas- 
sion and a fierce joy of battle. They were hunters seeking 
their prey. They were Berserkers of the air, determined to 
kill though they should be killed, to scatter death among the 
enemy, to destroy him in the air and on the earth, to smite 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 209 

him in his body and in his works and in his soul by a terror 
of him. This may seem language of exaggeration, the silly 
fantasy of a writing-man careless of the exact truth. It is 
less than the truth, and the sober facts are wild things. 
Early on June 7 they were up and away, as I described them, 
passing overhead on that fateful morning before the crim- 
son feather clouds appeared over the battlefield. They 
flew above German railway stations far behind the lines, and 
dropped tons of explosives, blowing up rolling stock, smash- 
ing rails and bridges. They attacked German aerodromes, 
flying low to the level of the sheds and spattering them 
with machine-gun bullets so that no German airmen came 
out of them that day. One man's flight, told in his own 
dry words, is like the wild nightmare of an airman's dream. 
He flew to a German aerodrome and circled round. 
A German machine-gun spat out bullets at him. The air- 
man saw it, swooped over it, and fired at the gunner. He 
saw his bullets hit the gun. The man ceased fire, screamed, 
and ran for cover. Then our airman flew off, chased trains 
and fired into their windows. He flew over small bodies of 
troops on the march, swooped, fired, and scattered them. 
Afterwards he met a convoy going to Comines, and he cir- 
cled over their heads, hardly higher than their heads, and 
fired into them. Near Warneton he came upon troops mass- 
ing for a counter-attack, and made a new attack, inflicting 
casualties and making them run in all directions. 

One of our flying men attacked and silenced four ma- 
chine-gun teams in a strong emplacement. Others cleared 
trenches of German soldiers, who scuttled like rabbits into 
their dug-outs. They fired everything they carried at any- 
thing which would kill the enemy or destroy his material. 
Having used up all his Lewis-gun ammunition upon march- 
ing troops, one lad fired his Very-lights, his signal-rockets, 
at the next group of men he saw. They flew at field-gun- 
ners and put them to flight, at heavy guns crawling along 
the roads on caterpillar wheels, at transport wagons, motor- 
lorries, and one motor-car, whose passengers, if they live. 



210 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

will never forget that sudden rush of wings four feet over- 
head, with a spasm of bullets about them. The aeroplane 
was so low that the pilot thought he would crash into the 
motor-car, but he just planed clear of it as the driver steered 
it sharply into a ditch, where it overturned with its five oc- 
cupants. The airman went on his journey, scattered 500 
infantry and returned home after a long flight never higher 
than 500 feet above the ground. 

Meanwhile during the progress of the battle our air squad- 
rons appointed for artillery observation work were all over 
the enemy's batteries, signalling to our gunners and sending 
back "O.K." flashes when our counter-battery work was ef- 
fective. There were an amazing number of "O.K.'s." One 
air squadron alone helped a group of heavies to silence 
seventy-two batteries. Everywhere over the battle-ground 
our air scouts were out and about, watching the progress of 
infantry, speaking to them by signals, picking up their an- 
swers, flying back to headquarters with certain informa- 
tion; so that the direction of the battle was helped enor- 
mously by this quick intelligence. It was a day of triumph 
for the Royal Flying Corps, and for all those boys with 
wings on their breasts, who, after their day's flight, come 
down to the French estaminets to rattle ragtime on un- 
tuned pianos, and give glad eyes to any pretty girl about, 
and fling themselves into the joy of life which they risk so 
lightly. 

In this battle of Messines there was not any body of our 
men who did not spend all their strength and take all risks 
with a kind of passionate exultation of spirit. The Man- 
chester men dug a six-foot deep trench-line to our new front 
on the ridge, beating all records. Flinging off tunics and 
shirts so that they were naked to the waist, New-Zea- 
landers who took Messines dug as inspired diggers, fast 
and furiously, and before next day had dawned had two 
long, deep trenches as secure defences against German 
counter-attacks. 

The stretcher-bearers, the water-carriers, the transport 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 211 

men with their pack-mules went up through shell-fire as I 
saw them yesterday, and never tired. The stretcher-bearers 
were heroic fellows, as in every battle from which I have 
seen them coming back with their burdens across the cra- 
tered ground of dreadful fields such as that of Wytschaete 
and Messines, still shelled heavily by the enemy, whose fury 
at losing that long-held ground is proved by his bombard- 
ment of their ruins — the red brick-heap of Wytschaete Cha- 
teau, the black tree-stumps which is all that is left of Mes- 
sines. 

Our casualties remain light, as figures of losses go in this 
war and in proportion to the greatness of this battle. My 
own estimates, based upon what I can hear of the losses of 
different bodies of troops engaged, work out at something 
like 10,000 for the day of battle. It is less than a fifth 
of what I should have reckoned to be the cost of this cap- 
ture of Messines Ridge, and gives the lie to German claims. 
It is one of the greatest and cheapest achievements of Brit- 
ish arms throughout this war, though the loss of so many 
gallant men is sad enough, God knows, and for the enemy it 
is as hard a blow as our taking of the Vimy Ridge two 
months ago, when he was staggered by his loss. 



The Effect of the Blow 

I 
June ii 
The effect of our capture of Messines and Wytschaete has 
been such a stunning blow on the enemy that he has not as 
yet made any attempt at counter-attacking on a big scale. 
The rapid advance of our men below the farther slopes of 
the ridge and the rush forward of our guns made it im- 
possible for him to rally his supporting troops quickly, and 
as the hours pass it becomes more impossible for him to 
storm his way back. His early attempts to assemble troops 



212 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

in the Warneton neighbourhood were annihilated instantly 
by enormous shell-fire directed by the new observation we 
had gained at Messines, and during the past twenty-four 
hours, up to the time I write, he shows no further sign of 
asking for trouble, but is obviously engaged in reorganizing 
his forces, demoralized by defeat, and getting his guns into 
safer positions. Many of his guns lie battered and buried 
about the battlefield, and some of his batteries, put out of 
action by our bombardment, remain between our new lines 
and his, but so covered by our fire that he has a poor 
chance of getting them away. His losses in guns, trench- 
mortars and machine-guns must be alarming to him, for 
I have no doubt at all, after seeing the frightful effect of 
our bombardment, that these were destroyed on a great 
scale, so that the number of our trophies will not at all 
represent his actual loss in weapons and material of war. 

That is the human mechanical side of things. More hor- 
rible to the unfortunate soldiers of the German army is the 
devilish punishment inflicted upon them during the past 
ten days, culminating on that day of battle when every 
weapon for the slaughter of men, from the heaviest of high 
explosives to boiling oil and gas-shells, was let loose upon 
them in one wild tempest of destruction, which blew them 
out of the earth and off the earth, and frizzled them and 
blinded them, and choked them and mutilated them, and 
made them mad. 

One German boy, who looked not more than fifteen years 
of age — a child — was found yesterday lying in a shell-hole 
by the side of a dead man who had been shot through the 
temple, and he was a gibbering idiot through fear. Not 
the only one. German officers say that many of their men 
went raving mad under the strain of our bombardment, 
and tried to kill their comrades or themselves, or fell into 
an ague of terror, clawing their mouths, with all the symp- 
toms of the worst shell-shock. 

Many of our prisoners believe they were betrayed, and 
were sacrificed coldly and deliberately by their higher com- 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 213 

mand. Before the battle an order of the day was issued to 
them, telHng them to hold out if surrounded and fight their 
way back with the bayonet, because behind them would be 
fresh divisions ready to support immediate counter-attacks. 
Those fresh divisions never appeared. We know that they 
had no chance of getting near our lines because of our 
far-reaching fire, and the work of our aircraft — and the 
men of Messines and Wytschaete and all the ground south 
of St.-Eloi were cut off and captured, if they did not die. 
After our first assaults, the enemy, panic-stricken, were 
more concerned in getting away their guns than in pro- 
tecting their troops, and they were left to our mercy. 

Walking about those monstrous mine-craters which we 
tore out of the earth at dawn on June 7, and across 
the old German lines beyond St.-Eloi on the left of our 
attack, southwards by Wytschaete and the lower slopes 
of Messines, to-day, as after the morning of battle, I 
pitied any human souls who had to suffer what these 
German soldiers must have suffered in the agony of 
fear before death came to many of them. All this 
wide area of country is blasted and harrowed and 
holed with monstrous pits. There was at least one great 
shell to every nine yards, and at 200 yards its flying steel 
has a killing power. No idea of it all can be conveyed by 
many words describing this upheaval of sand-bags and 
barricades and trenches and redoubts, and this sieve of 
earth, pitted by countless shell-craters. All the woods where 
the Germans lived — Oaten Wood and Damstrasse Wood 
and Ravine Wood, down to Wytschaete Wood and Hell 
Wood — are but gaunt stumps sticking out of ash-grey heaps 
of earth. German dead lie here and there in batches or 
in rows as they were shot down by enfilade fire, but I have 
seen very few bodies, for the most of them were buried 
in the upheaved earth, as one can tell by the foul vapours 
which creep out from the smashed trenches, where the deep 
dug-outs have collapsed and tunnels have fallen in, so that 



214 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

all this battleground is a graveyard of men, buried as they 
died or before they died. 

Three men escaped by some wild freak of chance from a 
mine-crater under the Mound by St.-Eloi. I stood on the lip 
of it to-day, high above its shelving sides, and find it hard 
to believe that any living thing could have escaped from 
its upheaval. But the Germans had many dug-outs in the 
old craters which existed here before this last one was 
blown, and after that ferocious fighting a year ago, when 
we lost this ground. One of those dug-outs remained firm 
when our mine was touched off four days ago, and out of 
its mouth crept, two days later, three haggard men, still 
shaking and dazed, who had been deep in the ground when 
all about them was hurled sky-high, with a rush of gas 
and flame and a monstrous uproar. They were unscathed, 
except in their souls, where terror lived. 

By my side to-day, as I looked down into this pit of hell, 
stood a man who had worked for a year in the making 
of it — an Australian officer of engineers. He stood smok- 
ing his pipe on the edge of the shell-crater, and said in a 
cheerful way, "It is good to be in the fresh air again." 

The fresh air did not seem to me very good there this 
morning. It was filled with abominable noise, which is a 
menace of death — the savage whine of German shrapnel 
flung about between the Bluff and St.-Eloi in a haphazard 
way, and heavy crumps searching for our batteries in their 
new positions, and our shells whistling over in long flights. 
Hideous sounds in a ghastly scene which filled me with 
nausea, so that I wanted not to linger there. 

But I understood this Australian's craving for open-air 
life, even such open air as this, when he told me that he 
had been working underground for nearly two years in the 
dark saps pierced under the German lines, and running very 
close to German saps nosing their way, and sometimes 
breaking through, to ours, so that the men clawed at each 
other's throats in these tunnels and beat each other to 
death with picks and shovels, or were blown to bits bj 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 215 

mine explosions. It was always a race for time to blow up 
the charges, and sometimes the enemy was first, and some- 
times we were, and once the enemy in a great attack against 
the Canadians got in and blew up our shafts and sapheads 
and cut off our tunnellers. That Australian officer was one 
of those. For forty-eight hours he was buried alive, and 
had to dig his way out. So now after his iob was done he 
likes the open-air life. 

"No more underground work for me after this war," 
he said. "I've had enough of it." 

The German ground hereabouts was taken by those troops 
of ours whose fighting across the Damstrasse and in Ravine 
Wood I described yesterday. Through them went an- 
other body of troops — the troops of the 24th Division — 
whose fortunes I have described in other battles, includ- 
ing some Leinster lads who have a padre for their hero, 
and English county troops who knew the look of Vimy 
Ridge before the Canadians reached the crest of it. They 
had to make the final assault to the farthest line of attack, 
passing through masses of men who had taken the first 
lines. All this was rehearsed in fields behind the battle- 
ground so thoroughly that the men could have gone for- 
ward blindfold. It all went like clockwork, and though the 
enemy fought hard on that last line beyond the Damstrasse 
by Rose Wood and Bug Wood, one post holding out with 
machine-guns, our men captured it with few casualties. 
They took 300 prisoners that day, with six field-guns, 
and their spirit is high after victory. Next morning the 
Irish padre was seen sitting outside a shell-hole with a clean 
white collar and white socks with his boots off. "Well 
done, boys!" he said, and they were glad to see him there. 

All our men were wonderfully inspired by a belief in the 
guns, so that they walked close behind a frightful barrage. 
Each body of troops vied with other regiments in a friendly 
rivalry. There was a race between the South and North 
Irish as to whether a green flag or an orange should be 
planted first above the ruins of Wytschaete. I don't know 



216 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

which won, but both flags flew there when the crest had 
been gained. 

5 
Looking Backward 

June 12 
"The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price." 

This sentence stands out as an absolute command in the 
German order issued to their troops before the battle which 
they knew was coming. The words are peremptory, among 
promises of artillery support and immediate counter-attacks 
from divisions behind the first-line troops, which would be 
read now as a hollow mockery by those men who are our 
prisoners, captured in crowds from their welter of mined 
and cratered earth. While half-way through the battle 
their artillery tried to drag their field-guns back to some- 
thing like safety in the wake of heavy guns, which even 
before the battle had been withdrawn to the farthest pos- 
sible range of action, though forward observing officers tried 
to conceal this from the infantry by coming to their usual 
posts. The battle is over. Messines Ridge, which was not 
to be ours at any price, is ours at a price which our Army 
thinks very cheap — though many brave men paid for it 
with their lives — and our outposts are pushing forward 
towards Warneton, far beyond the farther slopes, after 
an enemy retiring upon that place. Only our men who have 
fought in the Ypres salient know the full meaning of that 
order. "The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at 
any price." 

The Messines Ridge was our curse, and the loss of it 
to the enemy means a great relief to that curse by straight- 
ening out the salient south of Hooge, and robbing the enemy 
of direct observation over our ground and forcing his guns 
farther back. 

From Messines and Wytschaete he had absolute ob- 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 217 

servation of a wide tract of country in which our men hved 
and died — how complete an observation I did not realize 
until after this battle, when standing in Wytschaete Wood 
and on the Mound by St.-Eloi, and on the ground rising 
up to Messines, I looked back, and saw every detail of our 
old territory laid out like a relief map brightly coloured. 
*'My God," said an officer by my side, "it's a wonder they 
allowed us to live at all," He had fought in the old days 
in the salient, had lived like a hunted animal there, hiding 
in holes from the monstrous birds of prey screeching and 
roaring overhead in search of human flesh. Before us 
now, looking as the Germans used to look, we saw all this 
countryside, which is a field of honour, where our youth has 
fallen in great numbers, a great graveyard of gallant boy- 
hood. The enemy could see every movement of our men, 
unless they moved underground or under the cover of foli- 
age on Kemmel Hill and its leafy lanes, or behind the camou- 
flage screens which run along the roadways, or between the 
gaps in the ruined villages. Startlingly clear were the red 
roofs of Dickebusch and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses, 
into which for two years and a half the enemy has flung 
big shells, and the church tower of Kemmel, where the 
graves are opened by shell-fire and old bones laid bare. The 
roads to Voormezeele and Vierstraat, through which I went 
yesterday, are still under the old spell of horror, and all 
those obscene ruins of decent Flemish hamlets. South- 
ward one saw Neuve-Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and 
Plug Street Wood, where bullets snapped between the 
branches about Piccadilly Circus and down the Strand 
and across to Somerset House, and where at Hyde Park 
Corner I first heard the voice of "Percy," a high-velocity 
fellow, who kills you with a quick pounce. German eyes 
staring from Wytschaete and Messines, making little marks 
on big maps, talking to their gunners over telephone wires, 
and registering roads and cross-roads, field-tracks, camps, 
billets, farmhouses tucked into little groups of trees through 
which their red roofs gleamed, watching through telescopes 



218 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

for small parties of British soldiers or single figures in a 
flowered tapestry of fields between the winding hummocks 
of sand-bag parapets, had all this ground of ours at the 
mercy of their guns, and that was not merciful. 

Day by day two years ago I used to see Dickebusch in 
clouds of smoke, and hated to go through the place. They 
shelled separate farmhouses and isolated barns until they 
became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They 
shelled the roads down which our transports came at night, 
and communication-trenches up which our men moved to 
the front lines, and gun-positions revealed by every flash, 
and dug-outs foolishly frail against their frightful 59' s, 
which in early days we could only answer with a few pip- 
squeaks. Yet by some extraordinary freak, not certainly by 
any kind of charity, for that does not belong to war, there 
were places they failed to shell, though they were clearly 
visible — little groups of Flemish cottages with flaming red 
tiles, a big old house here or there with pointed roofs rising 
above a screen of poplar-trees, fields still cultivated, as I 
saw them yesterday, by old Flemish women who bent over 
the beetroots and hung out washing under German eyes and 
German guns, and went up and down with plough-horses 
close to our gun-positions, and sold bad beer to English 
soldiers glad of any kind of beer in places where death was 
imminent and where, as they drank, the glass might be 
smashed out of their hand by a flying scythe or a yard of 
wall. 

"Why do you stay here?" I asked an old woman in Plug 
Street village a year and a half ago. Four children played 
about her, though at the time shells were whining overhead 
and crashing but half a field away. 'Tt is my home," she 
said, and thought that a good enough answer. 

"How about the children?" I asked, and she said, "It's 
their home, and we earn a little money." 

Even when this last battle began those peasants still 
remained encircled by our batteries and with German crumps 
falling about their fields; blear-eyed old men gazed up to 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 219 

the sky, watched the flame-bursts of the mines, then turned 
to their earth again; and the battle itself was heralded at 
dawn by the crowing of cocks in little farmsteads some- 
where down by Kemmel. Chanticleer sounded the battle- 
charge with his clarion note, as in old dawns when English 
and French knights were drawn in line of battle. 

An officer who was with me in Wytschaete Wood, looked 
down at these old places where he had lived in the menace 
of death, and remembered his escapes; that time when the 
back of his dug-out was hit by a huge shell as he sat in his 
pyjamas, smoking a cigarette; and that other time when his 
servant was buried alive quite close to him, and the nights 
and days under constant shell-fire. But these little home- 
steads in or about the salient are few in their strange es- 
cape, and elsewhere there is not a building which stands 
unpierced or in more than a fragment of ruin. Young 
officers of ours lived within these ruins wondering whether 
it would be this day or next, now, as they spoke, or in the 
silence that followed, that some beastly shell would burst 
through and tear down the Kirchner prints which they 
had pinned to broken timbers, and smash the bits of mir- 
ror they used for shaving-glasses and lay them out in the 
wreckage. When he goes home on leave and sits at his 
own hearthside these dream-pictures come back to him with 
their old horror, as to thousands of men who have fought 
in the salient, like, those London boys I met one night in 
Ypres cooking cocoa under shell-fire, like those King's Royal 
Riflemen I saw going up to a counter-attack after the first 
attack by "flammenwerfer," and the padre who went up to 
the canal bank at night and found five dead men in a Red 
Cross hut and not a soul alive about him, and the Canadians 
who fought through a storm of shells in Maple Copse. 

The horror of that salient in its old evil days lives in its 
sinister place-names : Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow 
Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street, Dead Dog Farm, 
and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi, Stinking 
Farm, and Suicide Corner, and Shell-Trap Barn. I passed 



220 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

by some of these places and felt cold in remembrance of all 
the evil of them. Boys of ours have been smashed in all 
these ill-famed spots. Every bit of ruin here is the scene of 
foul tragedy to young life. To these places women will 
come to weep when the war is done, and the stones will 
be memorials of brave hearts who came here in the dark- 
ness with just a glance at the lights in the sky and a word 
of "Carry on, men," before they fell. 



The Australians at Messines 

June 17 
The sun is fierce and hot over Flanders, giving great splen- 
dour to this June of war, but baking our troops brown and 
dry. Up in the battle-line thirst is a cruel demon in that 
shadowless land of craters, where the earth itself is parched 
and cracked, and where there is a white, blinding glare. 

On the day of the Messines battle water went up quickly, 
with two lemons for each man, "to help them through the 
barrage," according to a young staff officer with a bright 
sense of humour at the mess-table. But there was never 
too much, and in some places not enough for the wounded 
men, whose thirst was like a fire, and yet not greedy, poor 
chaps, if there was only a little to go round. 

"Can you spare a drop," said a group of them — all Aus- 
tralian lads — to a friend of mine who was going up one 
day with a kerosene-tin full of water to the front line. 
"The fellows up in front want it badly," said my friend, 
"and I promised to get it there, but if you'll just take a 
sip " 

Those Australians were all in a muck of wounds and 
sweat. But they just moistened their lips and passed the 
water on. One man shook his head and said, "Take it 
to the fellows in front." It was the old Philip Sidney 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 221 

touch by way of Australia, and it is not rare among all 
our fighting men — lawless chaps when they are on a loose 
end, but great-hearted children at times like this. 

All this pageant of war in France and Flanders is on 
fire with sun, and it is wonderful to pass through the 
panorama of the war zone, as I do most days, and get a 
picture of it into one's eyes and soul — columns of men 
marching with wet, bronzed faces through clouds of white 
dust, or through fields where there is a patchwork tapestry 
of colour woven of great stretches of clover drenching the 
air with its scent, and of poppies which spill a scarlet flood 
down the slopes, and of green wheat and gold-brown earth. 
Gunners ride in their shirts with sleeves rolled up. About 
old barns men work in their billets stripped to the belt. Up 
in the "strafed" country of the old salient men sit about 
ruins between spells of work on roads and rails on the 
shady side of shell-broken walls, dreaming of bottled beer 
and rivers of cider, and the New-Zealanders are as brown 
as gipsies under their high felt hats. 

Talk to any group of men, or go into any officers' mess, 
and one hears about new aspects and angles of the recent 
fighting by our Second Army; episodes which throw new 
light on the enemy's losses and our men's valour, and suf- 
ferings — because it wasn't a "walk-over" all the way round 
— and incidents, which ought to be historic, but just come 
out in a casual way of gossip by men who happened to be 
there. 

I only heard yesterday about twenty German officers 
who were dragged out of one dug-out near Wytschaete. 
They were all huddled down there in a black despair, know- 
ing their game was up as far as the Messines Ridge was con- 
cerned. Their men had all gone to the devil, according to 
their view of the situation, abandoned by the guns, which 
might have protected them. The Second Division of East 
Prussians had been wiped out. Of a strength of 3600 we 
captured over 2000, whilst most of the rtoiainder must 
be killed or wounded. In the counter-attack the Germans 



222 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

brought up a new division and flung them in, and the queer 
thing is that our men were not aware of this, but just 
marched through them to their final goal, believing they be- 
longed to the original crowd on Messines Ridge, and not 
the counter-attacking troops who had just arrived. 

The Australians had some great adventures in this bat- 
tle, and not enough has been told about them, because 
they took a good share of the fighting, especially in the 
last phase of it, when they passed through some of our 
first-wave troops and held a broad stretch of new front 
under violent fire and against the enemy's endeavours to. 
retake the ground. On the extreme right of our -line, 
forming the pivot of the attack, was a body of Australian 
troops who had to get through the German barrage and 
fling duck-board bridges over the little Douve river, and 
cross to the German support line under machine-gun fire 
from a beastly little ruin called Grey Farm. The enemy 
was sniping from shell-holes, and bullets were flying about 
rather badly. A young Australian officer dealt with Grey 
Farm, crawling through a hedge with a small party of 
men, and setting fire to the ruin, so that it should give 
no more cover. Meanwhile, farther to the north, the Ger- 
mans were still about in gaps not yet linked up, and in strong 
points not yet cleared. A body of them gave trouble in 
Huns' Walk on the Messines road, where there was a belt 
of uncut wire when the Australians arrived. "Hell !" said 
the Australians. "What are we going to do about that?" 
There was heavy shell-fire and machine-gun fire, and the 
sight of .that wire was disgusting. 

"Leave it to me," said a young Tank officer. "I guess 
old Rattle-belly can roll that down." He and other Tank 
officers were keen, even at the most deadly risks, to do good 
work with their queer beasts alongside the Australians for 
reasons that belong to another story. 

They did good work, and this Tank at Huns' Walk 
crawled along the hedge of wire and laid it flat, as its 
tracks there still show. Another Tank was slouching 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 223 

about under heavy shelling in search of strong posts, with 
the Australian boys close up to its flanks with their bayo- 
nets fixed. Suddenly, a burst of flame came from it, and it 
seemed a doomed thing. But out of the body of the beast 
came a very cool young man, who mounted high with bits 
of shell whistling by his head. He stamped out the fire, and 
did not hear the comments of the Australian lads, who said, 
"Gosh, that fellow is pretty game. He's all right." 

Much farther north another Tank came into action, with 
the Australians near. A few old remnants of charred wall 
and timber, where there was a strong post of Germans in 
concrete chambers, were causing our troops loss and worry. 
"Anything I can do to help you?" asked a Tank officer very 
politely through the steel trap-door. "Your machine-guns 
would be jolly useful in our trench," said an Australian of- 
ficer. "We are a bit under strength here." 

The Tank officer was a friend in distress. He dis- 
mantled his machine-guns, took them into the trench and 
fought alongside the Australians until they were relieved. 

Just west of Van Hove Farm, in a gap between the Aus- 
tralians and the English, the Germans got into a place called 
Polka Estaminet — don't imagine it as a neat little inn with 
a penny-in-the-slot piano in the front parlour — and they 
had to be driven out by sharp rifle-fire. Next morning 
one of our men walked into a pocket of a hundred Germans, 
and a young Australian officer was told off with twenty men 
to bomb them out. There was a battle of bombs, which was 
very hot while it lasted, and then the Germans bolted off 
under machine-gun and rifle fire. Australian patrols went 
out and brought in forty wounded Germans and counted 
sixty to eighty dead. 



224 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

7 

A Battle in a Thunder-Storm 

June 29 
In a violent thunder-storm whose noise and lightning min- 
gled in an awesome way with the tumult and flame of the 
great artillery a minor battle broke out last evening round 
Lens and southwards beyond Oppy. The Canadians fought 
their way into Avion, a southern suburb of Lens, to a line 
giving them the larger half of the village, and driving the 
enemy back across the swamps to the outer defences of 
Lens city. Outside Oppy and south of it troops of old 
English county regiments seized the front-line system of 
German trenches and captured about 200 prisoners and 
several guns. West of Lens some Midland troops stormed 
and gained a line of trenches which belong to the main de- 
fences of the city, and north of it there was a big raid which 
caused great loss of life to the enemy. It was a heavy series 
of blows falling suddenly upon him, and giving him no time 
for a leisurely retirement to his inner line of defence in Lens 
I saw the beginning of the battle, and watched the fright- 
ful gun-fire until darkness and dense banks of smoke blotted 
out this vision of the mining cities in which men were fight- 
ing through bursting shells. That beginning was a terrify- 
ing sight, and a sense of the enormous tragedy of the world 
in conflict overwhelmed one's soul, because of the strange 
atmospheric effects, and that most we^'rd mingling of storm 
and artillery, as though the gods were angry and stirred to 
reveal the eternal forces of their own thunderbolts above 
this human strife. Just in front of where I crouched in 
a shell-crater was Swallows' Wood, or the Bois d'Hiron- 
delle, and beyond that La Coulotte, which the Canadians 
had just taken, and a little way farther the long strag- 
gle of streets which is Avion, leading up to Lens, with its 
square-towered church and high water-towers and factory 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 225 

chimneys. Straight and long, bordered by broken trees, 
went the Arras-Lens road, on which any man may walk 
to a certain rendezvous with death if he goes far enough, 
and I saw how it crossed the Souchez river by the broken 
bridge of Leauvette, from which the Canadians were going 
to make their new attack. A gleam of sunlight rested there 
for a while, and the little river was a blue streak this side of 
Avion. But the sky began to darken strangely. The air 
was still and hushed. A blue dusk crept across the land- 
scape. The trees of Hirondelle Wood and the towers of 
Lens blackened. Far behind Vimy, old ruins — of Souchez 
and Ablain-St.-Nazaire — were white and ghostly. 

One of my companions in a shell-hole looked up and said : 
"Is the 'good old German God' at work again?" Other 
powers were at work. Huge shells from our heavy how- 
itzers, now away behind us, passed overhead with a noise 
such as long-tailed comets must have. I watched them 
burst, raising volumes of ruddy smoke in Avion and Lens. 
To the right of Lens by Sallaumines there was some other 
kind of explosion, rolling up and up in big, curly clouds. In 
the still air there was the drone of many engines. The 
darkening sky was full of black specks, which were Brit- 
ish aeroplanes flying out on reconnaissance over Lens and 
Avion. "O brave birds 1" said a friend by my side, waving 
up to them. German shrapnel puffed about their wings, 
bursting with little glints of flames, but they flew on. 

It was then just seven o'clock. Our guns had almost 
ceased fire. There were strange sinister silences over all 
the battlefield, broken only by single gun-shots or the high 
snarl of German shrapnel or the single thud of a German 
crump. It was almost dark. The blue went out of the 
little Souchez river. Lens and Avion were in gulfs of 
blackness, A long rolling thunderclap shook all the sky, 
and flashes of lightning zigzagged over the Vimy Ridge, 
whitening the edges of its upheaved earth. The sky opened, 
and a storm of rain swept down fiercely, 

"Yes, the 'good old German God' is busy again," said my 



2^6 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

fellow-tenant of the shell-crater and of the pond that welled 
up in it. "J^st our beastly luck !" It was ten minutes past 
seven, and we had heard that the battle was to begin at 
seven. Perhaps it had been postponed. 

As the thought was uttered the battle began. It began 
with one great roar of guns. Not only behind us but 
far to our right and left. Flights of shells passed over 
our heads as though long-tailed comets of the spheres had 
broken loose from the divine order of things. In a wide 
sweep round Lens they burst with sharp flashes and 
lighted fires there. Outside the Cite du Moulin, at the 
western edge of Lens, a long chain of golden fountains 
rose as though little mines had been blown, and they were 
followed by a high bank of white impenetrable smoke. On 
the right of Avion another smoke-barrage was discharged, 
and above it there rose one of the strangest things I have 
seen in war. It was the figure of a woman, colossal, so 
that her head seemed to reach the heavens. It was not a 
fanciful idea, as when men watch the shapes of clouds 
and say, "How like Gladstone!" or "There is a camel!" 
or "A ship!" This woman figure of white solid smoke 
was as though carved out of rock, and she seemed to stare 
across the battlefield, and stayed there unchanged for sev- 
eral minutes. The guns continued their fury. Rockets 
went up out of Avion, and the German guns answered 
these signals. There was one wild tumult of artillery 
beating down the lines southward to Oppy, and beyond 
and above and through and into all this violence of sound 
there was the roll and rattle of thunder — heavy claps — and 
the rattle of the storm-drums. Lightning flashed above the 
flashes of our batteries, gave a livid outline to black trees 
and chimneys, and pierced the heart of all this darkness 
with long light swords. It was bad luck for our men, 
as I have heard since from messages which came back out 
of those smoke-banks through which no mortal eye could 
see. The men were drenched to the skin as soon as they 
started to attack. The rain beat into their faces and upon 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 227 

their steel hats. In a few minutes all the shelled ground 
across which they had to fight became as slippery as ice, so 
that many of them stumbled and fell. In Avion the enemy 
had already let loose floods to stop the way to Lens, and by 
the rain-storm they spread into big swamps. But the Cana- 
dians went ahead straight into the streets of Avion, leaving 
little searching-parties on their trail to make sure of the 
ruined houses, where machine-guns might be hidden. 

This street fighting is always a nasty business, but in the 
south and western streets there was not much trouble from 
German infantry. Round Leauvette many of them lay dead. 
The living rear-guards surrendered in small parties from 
cellars and tunnels. The chief trouble of the Canadians 
was on the right, by Fosse 4 and a huddle of pit-heads 
where the enemy was in strength with many machine-guns, 
where he fired with a steady sweep of bullets, which I heard 
last night above all the other noise. The Canadians swung 
to the left a Httle to avoid that stronghold, and established 
themselves on a diagonal line, striking north-west and 
south-east through the slums, where they took what 
cover they could from the German shell-fire. To the left 
of Lens our Midland troops had some hard fighting in 
front of the Cite du Moulin, and gave a terrible handling 
to the Eleventh Reserve Division, who have previously 
suffered on the Canadian front, so that they were disgusted 
to find themselves near their old enemies again. They re- 
lieved the Fifty-sixth Division, which is down to one-seventh 
of its strength since fighting against the Leinsters in the Bois- 
en-Hache, near Vimy. The raid farther north inflicted 
frightful losses on the enemy in his dug-outs. In one big 
tunnelled dug-out not a man escaped. 

The attack at Oppy, in the south, was a successful ad- 
vance by Warwickshire lads and other English troops, who 
followed a great barrage into the enemy's front-trench sys- 
tem and captured all those of the garrison who were not 
quick enough to escape. They were men of the Fifth 



228 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Bavarian Division, which is one of the best in the German 
army, and made up of very tough fellows. 

So the evening ended in our favour, and our losses were 
not heavy, I am told. Not heavy, though always the price 
of victory has to be paid by that harvest of wounded who 
came back under the Red Cross down the country lanes 
of France. 

8 

The Tragedy at Lombartzyde 

July 13 
The Germans have claimed a victory near Lombartzyde, 
and it is true that by heavy gun-fire they have driven us 
from our defences in a wedge-shaped tract of sand-dunes 
between the sea and the Yser Canal. This reverse of ours 
is not a great defeat. It is only a tragic episode of human 
suffering such as one must expect in war. But what is 
great — great in spiritual value and heroic memory — is the 
way in which our men fought against overwhelming odds 
and under annihilating fire, and did not try to escape nor 
talk of surrender, but held this ground until there was no 
ground but only a zone of bloody wreckage, and still fought 
until most of them were dead or disabled. 

The men who did that were the King's Royal Rifles and 
Northamptons of the ist Division, and this last stand of 
theirs beyond the Yser Canal will not be forgotten as long 
as human' valour is remembered by us. It is wonderful to 
think that after three years of war the spirit of our men 
should still be so high and proud that they will stand to 
certain death like this. Those men who came back from 
the other side of the canal came back wounded, and had 
to swim back. They were a remnant of those who have 
stayed, lying out there now in the chumed-up sand, or 
have been carried back to German hospitals. They were 
soldiers of the Northamptons and the Sixtieth. Among 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 229 

the King's Royal Rifles there were many London lads, 
from the old city which we used to think overcivilized and 
soft. Well, it was men like that who have shed their blood 
upon the sand-dunes, so that this tract by the sea is conse- 
crated by one of the most tragic episodes in the history of 
this war. 

It was on the seashore, when a high wind ruffled the 
waters on the morning of July lo, that the enemy began 
his attack with a deadly fire. His position was in a net- 
work of trenches, tunnels, concrete emplacements, and 
breastworks of thick sand-bag walls built down from the 
coast to the south of Lombartzyde. Facing him were other 
trenches and breastworks which we had recently taken over 
from the French. Behind our men was the Yser Canal, 
with pontoon bridges crossing to Nieuport and Nieuport- 
les-Bains. Without these bridges there was no way back 
or round for the men holding the lines in the dunes. The 
enemy began early in the morning by putting a barrage 
down on our front-line system of defences from a large 
number of batteries of heavy howitzers. Most of his shells 
were at least as large as 5-9's, and for one long hour they 
swept up and down our front, smashing breastworks and 
emplacements and flingir\g up storms of sand. After that 
hour the enemy altered his line of fire. There was a five 
minutes' pause, five minutes of breathing-space for men 
still left alive among many dead, and then the wall of 
shells crossed the canal and stayed there for another hour, 
churning up the sand with a tornado of steel. 

The guns then lifted to the front line again, and for 
another hour continued their work of destruction, paus- 
ing for one of those short silences which gave men hope 
that the bombardment had ceased. It had not ceased. It 
travelled again to the support line and stayed smashing 
there for sixty minutes — then across the canal again, then 
back all over again. 

There was one interval of a whole quarter of an hour, 
and the officers had time to tell their men that it must be 



230 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

a fight to the death, because the position must be held 
until that death. There must have been few of them who 
did not know that after that bombardment they would meet 
the enemy face to face if they still remained alive. 

The commanding officer of the Sixtieth became convinced 
by three o'clock in the afternoon that all this destructive fire 
was preparatory to a big attack. He saw that his bridges 
had gone behind him, so that there was no way of escape, 
and he saw that the enemy was trying to cut off all means 
of relief and communication. He tried to get messages 
through, but without success. Two shells came into his 
battalion headquarters, killing and wounding some of the 
officers and men crowded in this sand-bag shelter and 
dug-out in the dune. He took the survivors into a tunnel 
bored by the miners along the seashore, and here for a 
time they were able to carry on. But it was almost im- 
possible to get out to reconnoitre the situation, or to give 
some word of comfort or courage to men standing to arms 
amongst the wreckage. Flights of hostile aeroplanes were 
overhead, and they flew low and poured machine-gun fire at 
any living man who showed. Away behind they were 
searching for our batteries. 

At 6.15 all the German batteries broke into drum-fire 
and flung shells over the whole of our position for three- 
quarters of an hour without a second's pause. After all 
these previous barrages it reached the utmost heights of 
hellishness, destroying what had already been destroyed, 
sweeping all this wide tract of sand-dunes right away from 
the coast to the south of Lombartzyde with flame and smoke 
and steel, and reaping another harvest of death. 

There are many details of this action which may never 
be known. No man saw it from other ground, and those 
who were across that bank of the Yser could see very little 
beyond their own neighbourhood of bursting shells. But a 
sergeant of the Northamptons, who had an astounding es- 
cape, saw the first three waves of German marines advance 
with bombing parties. That was shortly after seven o'clock 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 231 

in the evening. They were in heavy numbers against a few 
scattered groups of EngHsh soldiers still left alive after a 
day of agony and blood. They came forward bombing 
in a crescent formation, one horn of the crescent trying 
to work round behind the flank of the Rifles on the sea- 
shore as the other tried to outflank the Northamptons on 
the right. 

A party of German machine-gunners crept along the edge 
of the sands, taking advantage of the low tide, and enfiladed 
the support line, now a mere mash of sand, in which some 
wounded and unwounded men held out, and swept them 
with bullets. Another party of the marines made straight 
for the tunnel, which was now the battalion headquarters 
of the Sixtieth, and poured liquid fire down it. Then they 
passed on, but as if uncertain of having completed their 
work, came back after a time and bombed it. Even then 
there was at least one man not killed in that tunnel. He 
stayed there among the dead till night and then crept out 
and swam across the canal. Two platoons of Riflemen 
fought to the last man, refusing tO' surrender. One little 
group of five lay behind a bank of sand, and fired with 
rifles and bombs until they were destroyed. 

Meanwhile the Northamptons, on the right, were fight- 
ing desperately. Seeing that the German marines were 
trying to get behind them on the right flank and that they 
had not the strength to resist this, they got a message 
through to some troops farther down in front of Lom- 
bartzyde to form a barrier so that the enemy could not 
come through, and these fought their way grimly up, thrust- 
ing back the enemy's storm troops, and then made a defen- 
sive block through which the marines could not force their 
way. 

The Northamptons fought without any chance of es- 
cape, without any hope except that of a quick finish. The 
German marines brought up a machine-gun and fixed it 
behind the place where the Northampton officers had es- 
tablished their headquarters, and fired up it. Our ma- 



232 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

chine-guns were out of action, filled with sand or buried 
in sand. One gunner managed to get his weapon into 
position, but it jammed at once, and with a curse on it, 
he flung it into the water of the Yser, and then jumped 
in and swam back. Another gunner lay by the side of his 
machine-gun, hit twice by shells, so that he could not work 
it. One of his comrades wanted to drag him off to the canal 
bank, in the hope of swimming back with him. To linger 
there a minute meant certain death. "Don't mind about 
me," said the machine-gunner of the Northamptons. 
"Smash my gun and get back." There was no time for 
both, so the gun was smashed and the wounded man stayed 
on the wrong side of the bank. 

The fighting lasted for an hour and a half after the be- 
ginning of the infantry attack. It was over at 8.30. The 
wounded sergeant of the Northamptons who swam back 
saw the last of the struggle. He saw a little group of his 
own officers, not more than six of them, surrounded by 
marine bombers, fighting to the end with their revolvers. 
The picture of these six boys out there in the sand, with 
their dead lying around them, refusing to yield and fight- 
ing on to a certain death, is one of the memories of this 
war that should not be allowed to die. 

Over the Yser Canal men were trying to swim, men 
dripping with blood and too weak to swim, and men who 
could not swim. Some gallant fellow on the Nieuport 
side — there is an idea that it was a Lancashire man — 
swam across with a rope under heavy fire and fixed it so 
that men could drag themselves across. So the few sur- 
vivors came over, and so we know, at least in its broad 
outline, how all this happened. It is a tragic tale, and 
there will be tears when it is read. But in the tragedy 
there is the splendour of these poor boys, young soldiers 
all, who fought with a courage as great as any in history, 
and have raised a cross of sacrifice beyond the Yser, be- 
fore which all men of our race will bare their heads. 

The enemy did not reach the canal bank, but stayed 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 233 

some 300 yards away from it. He was "beaten back from 
the trenches south of Lombartzyde, and gained no grotind 
there. 



9 

The Struggle for Hell Wood 

June 14 
Between Wytschaete and Messines is a wood, horribly 
ravaged by shell-fire, called on our trench-maps Bois de 
I'Enfer, or Hell Wood. North of it was a German strong 
point, with barbed-wire defences and heavy blocks of con- 
crete, called I'Enfer — Hell itself — and south of it, behind 
a labyrinth of trenches, some broken walls above a nest of 
dug-outs, known as Hell Farm. These filthy places were 
central defences of great fortified positions held by the 
enemy just north of Messines, and just south of Wyt- 
schaete, and round them and beyond them was some of 
the fiercest fighting which happened on that day of battle 
when we gained the Messines Ridge. 

Until now I have left out that part of the battle story — 
one cannot write the history of a battle like that in a day or 
two — but it must be told, because it was vastly important to 
the success of the general action, and the troops engaged 
in it showed the finest courage. They were men of the 
25th Division, including Cheshires, Irish Rifles, Lancashire 
Fusiliers, North Lanes, and Worcesters, and other country 
lads who were blooded in battles of the Somme, where once 
I watched them surging up the high slopes under a heavy 
fire and fighting their way into the German trenches. In 
this battle of Hell Wood they were so wonderful in the 
cool, steady way they fought that when an airman came 
down to report their progress he said to their General, 
*T knew your fellows, because they advanced in perfect 
order as though on parade." 

Before the battle, when they lay about Wulverghem, op- 



234 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

posite the fortress positions they had to attack, they did some 
great digging in the face of the enemy assembly trenches, as 
plain as pikestaves to German observers, and advertising, as 
did the enormous ammunition dumps, new batteries and 
wagon-lines, the awful stroke of attack that was being 
prepared. 

It was a record night's work of twelve hundred Lan- 
cashire lads who went out into the dead strip between their 
trenches and the enemy's, and dug Hke demons. When at 
dawn they crept back to their own lines they left behind them 
a trench four-feet-six deep and 1050 yards long for a jump- 
out line on the day of battle. The enemy officers saw it, and 
must have sickened at the sight. They marked it on their 
maps, which were captured afterwards. It was frightful 
ground in front of these troops of ours, as I have seen it 
partly for myself from the ground about the mine-craters 
looking over Hell Wood. 

The first part of our men's advance after the moment of 
attack was hardly checked, and they went forward in open 
order as steadily as though in the practice fields, through 
buttercups and daisies. Their trouble came later, when 
they found themselves under machine-gun fire from Hell 
Wood, on the left of their advance line, and from Hell 
Farm in front of them. It was a body of Cheshires who 
side-slipped to the left to deal with that fire from the wood. 
They made a dash for those scarred tree-trunks, from which 
a stream of bullets poured, and fought their way through to 
the German machine-gun emplacements, though a number 
of them feK. As they closed upon the enemy the German 
gunners ceased fire in a hurry. Many of them stopped ab- 
ruptly, with bullets in their brains, and fifty men surren- 
dered with fourteen machine-guns. Hell Farm was gained 
and held, and at the top of Hell Wood the Cheshires routed 
out another machine-gun, so that all was clear in this part of 
the field. 

Meanwhile the main body of assaulting troops — Lanca- 
shire Fusiliers, North Lanes, Irish Rifles, and Worcesters-^— 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 235 

has passed on to another system of defences known as Octo- 
ber Trench, which was a barrier straight across their way. 
Here, as they drew close, they came to a dead halt against 
a broad belt of wire uncut by our gun-fire, and hideously 
tangled in coils with sharp barbs. Behind, as some of 
the officers knew, the enemy had brought up twenty-six 
machine-guns, enough to sweep down a whole battalion 
held by wire like this. Even now the men don't know how 
they went over that wire. They knew instantly that they 
must get across or die. From October Support Trench, 
farther back, with another belt of uncut wire in front of 
it, heavy fire was coming from Germans who had their 
heads up. "Over you go, men," shouted the officers. The 
men flung themselves over, scrambled over, rolled over, tear- 
ing hands and faces and bits of flesh on those rusty prongs, 
but getting over or through somehow and anyhow. Parties 
of them raced on to October Support Trench, flung them- 
selves against that wire and got, bleeding and scratched, to 
the other side, unless they were killed first. Some of them 
fell. It was the most deadly episode of the day, but the 
Germans paid a ghastly price for this resistance, and 300 
German dead lie on that ground round the old ruins of Mid- 
dle Farm behind the wire. 

Away back when fighting here began was a body of Irish 
Rifles who had gone as far as they had been told to go. They 
saw what was happening, watched those other men flinging 
themselves against the barbed hedge. "To hell with staying 
here," shouted one of them. "To hell with it," said others. 
"We could do a power of good up there." 

"Come on then, boys," said the first men, beginning to 
run. They ran fast towards the end of the wire belt, 
slipped round it, and fell on the flank of the enemy. It 
was timely help to the other men, some of whom owe 
their lives to it. 

The second phase of the battle began when another body 
of the same troops passed through those who had already 
assaulted and won their ground, and went forward to a 



236 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

new line beyond. They passed through in perfect order, 
which is a most difficult manoeuvre in battle when the 
ground is covered with troops who have already been fight- 
ing, with wounded men and stretcher-bearers, and souvenir- 
hunters and moppers-up and runners, and all the tumult of 
new-gained ground. But in long, unbroken waves the 
fresh troops lined up beyond these crowds, and made ready 
to advance upon the new line of attack. Again, groups of 
them had to be separated from the main body in order to 
seize isolated positions on the wings, where groups of 
Germans were holding out and sweeping our flanks with 
fire. 

North-east and south-east of Lumm Farm were bits of 
trench from which the enemy was routed after sharp bouts 
of fighting. Beyond were some holed walls called Name- 
less Farm, and these were captured before the call of "cease 
firing," which was the signal for the party to halt while our 
guns began a new bombardment over the new line of attack."" 

It was this silence which scared an officer of the Cheshires, 
who had led his men away forward to capture a body of 
Germans trying to escape from Despagne Farm, right 
out in the blue this side of Owl Trench, which was the 
next position to be attacked, after our guns had dealt with 
it. A sergeant and two men of the Cheshires ran right into 
Despagne Farm and bayoneted the German machine-gun- 
ners who had been spraying bullets on our men. Then 
the officer seemed to feel his heart stop. He looked at 
his wrist-watch, and was shocked at the time it gave. The 
realization of the frightful menace approaching as every sec- 
ond passed made every nerve in his body tingle. It was our 
new bombardment. A vast storm of explosives which was 
about to sweep over this ground, already pitted with deep 
shell-holes, it seemed as though nothing could save this body 
of Cheshires, who had gone too far and could not get back 
before their own guns killed them. There was only one 
chance of escape for any of them, and that was for each 
man to dive into one of those eight-feet-deep shell-holes 



THE BATTLE OF MESSINES 237 

and crouch low, scratching himself into the shelving sides 
before the hellish storm of steel broke loose. The Cheshires 
did this, flung themselves into the pits, lay quaking there like 
toads under a harrow, and hugged the earth as the bombard- 
ment burst out and swept over them. By an amazing freak 
of fortune it swept over them quickly, and there were only 
two casualties among all those men huddled in holes, ex- 
pecting certain death. A bit of luck, said the men, get- 
ting up and gasping. Weaker men would have been broken 
by shell-shock and terror-stricken. These Cheshires went 
on, took the next German defences and many prisoners, 
and then dug in according to orders and prepared for 
anything that might happen in the way of trouble. It 
was the German counter-attack which happened. Six hun- 
dred men came debouching out of a gully called Blawepoort- 
beek, with its mouth opposite Despagne Farm. The Chesh- 
ires had their machine-guns in position and their rifles 
ready. They held back their fire until the German col- 
umn was within short range. Then they fired volley after 
volley, and those 600 men found themselves in a valley of 
death, and few; escaped. 



PART V 

The Battles of Flanders 

I 

' Breaking the Salient 

July 31 
The battle which all the world has been expecting has 
begun. After weeks of intense bombardment, not on our 
side only, causing, as we know, grave alarm throughout 
Germany and anxiety in our enemy's command, we launched 
a great attack this morning on a front stretching, roughly, 
from the River Lys to Boesinghe. We have gained ground 
everywhere, and with the help of French troops, who are 
iightihg shoulder to shoulder with our own men, in the 
northern part of the line above Boesinghe, we have cap- 
tured the enemy's positions across the Yser Canal and 
thrust him back from a wide stretch of country between 
Pilkem and Hollebeke. He is fighting desperately at va- 
rious points, with a great weight of artillery behind him, 
and has already made strong counter-attacks and flung up 
his reserves in order to check this sweeping advance. Many 
Tanks have gone forward with our infantry, sometimes in 
advance and sometimes behind, according to the plan of 
action mapped out for them, and have done better than 
well against several of the enemy's strong points, where, 
for a time, our men were held up by machine-gun fire. 

So far our losses are not heavy, and many of these are 
lightly wounded, but it is likely that the enemy's resist- 
ance will be stronger as the hours pass, because he reaHzes 

238 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 239 

the greatness of our menace, and will, beyond doubt, bring 
up all the strength he has to save himself from a complete 
disaster. During the past few weeks the correspondents in 
the field have not even hinted at the approach of the battle 
that has opened to-day, though other people have not been 
so discreet, and the enemy himself has sounded the alarm. 
But we have seen many of the preparations for this terrific 
adventure in the north, and have counted the days when all 
these men we have seen passing along the roads, all these 
guns, and the tidal wave of ammunition which has flowed 
northwards should be ready for this new conflict, more for- 
midable than any of the fighting which raged along the 
lines since April of this year. 

I am bound to say that as the days have drawn nearer 
some of us have shuddered at the frightful thing growing 
ripe for history as the harvests of France have ripened. 
Poring over maps of this northern front, and looking 
across the country from the coast-line and newly taken hills, 
like those of Wytschaete, the difficulty of the ground which 
our men have to attack has been horribly apparent. Those 
swamps in the north around Dixmude, the Yser Canal, 
which must be bridged under fire, the low flats of our 
lines around Ypres, like the well of an amphitheatre, with 
the enemy above on the Pilkem Ridge, were so full of peril 
for attacking troops that optimism itself might be frightened 
and downcast. 

As I have written many times lately, the enemy has massed 
great gun-power against us, and has poured out fire with 
unparalleled ferocity in order to hinder our preparations. 
Our bombardments were more terrific, and along the roads 
were always guns, guns, guns, going up to increase the rela- 
tive powers of our own and the German artillery. There 
was little doubt that in the long run ours would be over- 
whelming, but meanwhile the enemy was strong and de- 
structively inclined. All the time he was puzzled and nerve- 
racked, not knowing where our attack would fall upon him, 
and he made many raids, mostly unsuccessful, to find out 



240 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 



our plans, while we raided him day and night to see what 
strength he was massing to meet us. Russia lured him, and 
in spite of our threat he has sent off some six divisions, I 
believe, to his Eastern theatre of operations, but at the same 
time he relieved many of the divisions which had been broken 




by our fire in the lines, replacing them by his freshest and 
strongest troops. They did not remain fresh, even after 
only a few hours, for our guns caught some of them during 
their reliefs, as late as two o'clock this morning in the case 
of the 52nd Reserve Division, so that they stepped straight 
into an inferno of fire. 

The weather was against us, as many times before a bat- 
tle. Yesterday it was a day of rain and heavy, sodden 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 241 

clouds, so that observation was almost impossible for our 
flying men and kite-balloons, and our artillery was greatly 
hampered. The night was dark and moist, but luck was 
with us so far that a threatening storm did not break, and 
our men kept dry. The darkness was in our favour, and the 
assaulting troops were able to form up for attack very close 
to the enemy's lines — lines of shell-craters in fields of craters 
from which our storms of fire had swept away all trenches, 
all buildings, and all trees. The enemy held these forward 
positions lightly by small groups of men, who knew them- 
selves to be doomed, and waited for that doom in their pits 
like animals in death-traps. In their second-line defences, 
less damaged, but awful enough in wreckage of earthworks, 
the enemy was in greater strength, and from these positions 
flares went up all through the night, giving a blurred white 
light along the barriers of mist, and rising high into the 
cloudy sky. Scores of thousands of our men, lying on 
the wet earth in puddles and mud-holes, watched those 
flares and hoped they would not be revealed before the 
second when they would have to rise and go forward to 
meet their luck. They lay there silently, never stirring, 
nor coughing, nor making any rattle of arms, while Ger- 
man shells passed over them or smashed among them, 
killing and wounding some of those who lay close. _ Enemy 
aircraft came out in the night bolder than by day, since they 
have been chased and attacked and destroyed in great num- 
bers by British flying men, determined to get the mastery of 
the air, and to blind the enemy's eyes before this battle, and 
beyond any doubt successful as far as this day goes. The 
night-birds swooped over places where they thought our 
batteries were hidden and dropped bombs, but as they could 
see nothing their aim was bad, and they did no important 
damage, if any at all. So the hours of the night crept by, 
enormously long to all those men of ours waiting for the 
call to rise and go. Our gun-fire had never stopped for 
weeks in its steady slogging hammering, but shortly after 
half-past three this ordinary noise of artillery quickened and 



242 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

intensified to a monstrous and overwhelming tumult. It was 
so loud that twelve miles behind the lines big houses moved 
and were shaken with a great trembling. People farther 
away than that awakened with fear and went to their 
windows and stared out into the darkness, and saw wild 
fireballs in the sky, and knew that men were fighting and 
dying in Flanders in one of the great battles of the world. 
This morning I watched the fires of this battle from an 
observation-post on the edge of the salient. I knew vv^hat 
I should have seen if there had been any light, for I saw 
those places a day or two ago from the same spot. I should 
have seen the ghost-city of Ypres, and the curve of the sa- 
lient round by Pilkem, St.-Julien, and Zillebeke, and then 
Warneton and Houthem below the Messines Ridge. But 
now there was no light, but hundreds of sharp red flashes 
out of deep gulfs of black smoke and black mist. The red 
flashes were from our forward batteries and heavy guns, 
and over all this battlefield, where hundreds of thousands 
of men were at death-grips, the heavy, smoke-laden va- 
pours of battle and of morning fog swirled and writhed 
between clumps of trees and across the familiar places of 
death round Ypres, hiding everything and great masses of 
men. The drum-fire of the guns never slackened for hours. 
At nine o'clock in the morning it beat over the countryside 
with the same rafale of terror as it had started before four 
o'clock. Strangely above this hammering and thundering 
of two thousand guns or more of ours, answered by the 
enemy's barrage, railway whistles screamed from trains 
taking up more shells, and always more shells, to the very 
edge of the fighting-lines, and in between the massed bat- 
teries, using them as hard as they could be unloaded. 

Over at Warneton and Oostaverne, in the valley below 
the Messines Ridge, the enemy was pouring fire along our 
line, shells of the heaviest calibre, which burst monstrously, 
and raised great pillars of white smoke. It was a valley of 
death there, and our men were in it, and fighting for the 
slopes beyond. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 243 

It is a battle, so far, of English, Scottish, and Welsh 
troops, with some of the Anzacs — New-Zealanders as well 
as Australians — and all along the line they have fought hard 
and with good success over ground as difficult as any that 
has ever been a battlefield, because of the canal and the 
swamps and the hollow cup of the Ypres area, with the 
enemy on the rim of it. 

Among the battalions who fought hardest were the Liv- 
erpools, the South and North Lancashires, the Liverpool 
Scottish and Liverpool Irish, the Lancashire Fusiliers, Lan- 
cashire Regiment, the King's Royal Rifles, West Kents, Sur- 
reys, Durham Light Infantry, the Cheshires, Warwicks, 
Staffords, Sussex, Wiltshires and Somersets, the Royal Irish 
Rifles, the Black Watch, Camerons, Gordons and Royal 
Scots, the Welsh battalions, and the Guards. From north 
to south the Divisions engaged were the Guards, the 38th 
(Welsh), the 51st (Highland), the 39th, the 55th, the 
15th (Scottish), the 8th, 30th, 41st, 19th, and Anzacs 
on the extreme right. 

One can always tell from the walking wounded whether 
things are going ill or well. At least, they know the fire 
they have had against them, and the ease or trouble with 
which they have taken certain ground, and the measure 
of their sufferings. So now, with an awful doubt in my 
mind, because of the darkness and the anxiety of men 
conducting the battle over the signal-lines, and that awful 
drum-fire beating into one's ears and soul, I was glad to 
get first real tidings from long streams of lightly wounded 
fellows coming along from the dressing-station. They were 
lightly wounded, but pitiful to see, because of the blood that 
drenched them — bloody kilts and bloody khaki, and bare 
arms and chests, with the cloth cut away from their wounds, 
and bandaged heads, from which tired eyes looked out. One 
would not expect good tidings from men who had suffered 
like these, but they spoke of a good day, of good progress, 
of many prisoners, and of an enemy routed and surren- 
dering. "A good day" — that was their first phrase, though 



M4i FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

for them it meant the loss of a limb or sharp pain anyhow, 
and remembrance of the blood and filth of battle. They 
were eager to describe their fighting, and I saw again the 
pride of men in the courage of their comrades, forgetting 
their own, which had been as great. These lads told me 
how they lay out in the night, and how the German planes 
came over, bombing them ; how they rose and went forward 
in attack. The enemy was quickly turned out of his front 
line of shell-craters, and there were not many of him there. 
In the second line he was thickly massed, but some of them 
threw up their hands at once, crying "Mercy !" 

The Scots came up against a strong emplacement fitted 
with machine-guns, and here the German gunners fired 
rapidly, so that our men were checked. They rushed the 
place, and at the last a German hoisted a white flag, but 
even then others fired, and I met one young Scot to-day 
who had a comrade killed after that sign of surrender. 

Beyond Ypres, on the way to Menin, there was a big 
tunnel where our English lads expected trouble, as it could 
hold hundreds of Germans. But when they came to the tun- 
nel and ferreted down it they only found forty-one men, 
who surrendered at once. Some of the enemy's troops 
were quite young boys of the 19 18 class, but most of 
them were older and tougher men. The success of the 
day is shared by English troops, including the Guards, 
with the Welsh, who fought abreast of them with equal 
heroism, and with Scottish and Anzacs. The Welsh have 
wiped out the most famous German regiment of the Third 
Guards Division, known as the "Cockchafers." 

Fighting with us, the French troops kept pace with their 
usual gallantry, carrying all their objectives according to 
the time-table. In one great and irresistible assault, these 
troops of two nations swept across the enemy lines and have 
reached heights on the Pilkem Ridge, as I hope to tell to- 
morrow in greater detail. For the day, it is enough to say 
that our success has been as great as we dared to hope. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 245 



From Pilkem Ridge to Hollebeke 

August i 
The weather is still abominable. Heavy rain-storms have 
waterlogged the battlefields, and there are dense mists over 
all the countryside. It is bad for fighting on land, and worse 
for fighting in the air. But fighting goes on. Yesterday 
the enemy made strong counter-attacks at many points of 
our new line, and especially to the north of Frezenberg, 
west of Zonnebeke, where, at three in the afternoon, his 
infantry advanced upon the 15th (Scottish) Division after 
a violent bombardment. They were swept down by artillery 
and machine-gun fire. At five o'clock they came on again, 
moving suddenly out of a dense smoke-barrage, and gained 
300 yards of ground. Our guns poured shells on to this 
ground, and at nine o'clock last night our men went behind 
the barrage and regained this position. The enemy's gun- 
fire is intense over a great part of the country taken from 
him, and his long-range guns are shelling far behind the 
lines. Generally the situation is exactly the same as it 
stood at the end of the first day of battle, when our ad- 
vance was firm and complete at the northern end of the 
attack, where the Guards and the Welsh had swept over 
the Pilkem Ridge without great trouble, and where farther 
south the troops who had advanced beyond St.-Julien had to 
fall back a little, partly under the pressure of counter-at- 
tacks, but chiefly in order to get into line with their right 
wing, which had been engaged in the hardest fighting, and 
had not reached the same depth of country. That was in 
the wooded ground south-east of the salient, where the 
enemy had a large number of machine-guns in the cover 
of Glencorse Copse, Inverness Wood, and Shrewsbury For- 
est, and repulsed the very desperate attacks of the 8th and 
30th Divisions. 



246 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Outside one copse there was a very strong position, 
known to our men as Stirling Castle. It was once a 
French chateau, surrounded by a park and outbuildings, 
long destroyed but made into a strong point with concrete 
emplacements. Rapid machine-gun fire poured out of this 
place against our men, but it was captured after several 
rushes. The trenches in front of it were also gained by the 
Royal Scots and Durham Light Infantry of the 8th Divi- 
sion. Later a counter-attack was launched against them 
by the Germans of one of the young classes, and here 
at least these lads, who do not seem to have fought very 
well elsewhere, came on like tiger cubs and gained some of 
their trenches back. From all the woods in this neighbour- 
hood there was an incessant sweep of machine-gun bullets, 
and, as I have already said in earlier dispatches, many small 
counter-attacks were launched from them, without much 
success, but strong enough to make progress difficult to 
our men, now that the weather had set in badly, so that 
our guns were hampered by lack of aeroplane observation. 
All through the night and yesterday the enemy's barrage- 
fire was fiercely sustained, and our men dug themselves in 
as best they could, and took cover in shell-holes. 

Hard fighting had happened that day southward and on 
the right of our attack past Hollebeke and the line between 
Oostaverne and Warneton. Opposite Hollebeke there were 
English county troops of the 41st Division — West Kents, 
Surreys, Hampshires, Gloucesters, Oxford and Bucks, and 
Durham Light Infantry — and they went "over the bags," as 
they call it, in almost pitch-darkness, like the men on either 
side of them. This was the reason of an accident which was 
almost a tragedy. As they went forward over that shell- 
destroyed ground they left behind them Germans hidden in 
shell-pits, who sniped our men in the rear, and picked off 
many of them until later in the day they were routed out. 
Beyond this open country the ruins of Hollebeke were full 
of cellars, made into strong dug-outs, and crowded with Ger- 
mans who would not come out. They will never come out. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS Ml 

Our men flung bombs down into these underground places, 
and passed on to the Hne where they stay on the east side 
of the village. At a little bit of ruin there was some delay 
because of the machine-guns there, and for some time it 
was uncertain whether we held the place, as a messenger 
sent down to report its capture was killed on his journey. 
Along the line of the railway here there was a row of con- 
crete dug-outs, and a bomber of the Middlesex went up 
alone, climbed the embankment, and dropped bombs through 
their ventilator. So there was not much trouble from them. 

In some of the dug-outs in this neighbourhood about a 
score of bottles of champagne were found, for a feast by 
German officers. But our soldiers drank it; indeed, one — 
a Canadian fellow — drank a whole bottle to himself, being 
very thirsty, and after that he found one of the officers 
for whom the drink was meant, but for the fortune of 
war. He was lying on his truckle bed below ground, hop- 
ing, perhaps, to be asleep when death should come to him 
out of the tornado of fire which had swept over him for 
days "Come out of that," shouted the Canadian, and then, 
having left his arms behind him, dragged him out by the 
hair. 

South of Hollebeke three little rivers run. One of them 
is the Rozebeek, and another is the Wambeek, and the third 
is the Blaupoortbeek, and there is a small ridge between 
each of them, and a copse between them. Two bodies of 
English troops of the 19th and 37th Divisions — Lancashires, 
Cheshires, Warwicks, Staffords and Wiltshires, Somersets, 
Bed fords. South Lancashires, and Royal Fusiliers — attacked 
these positions, those on the right making their assault 
four hours later than those on the left. They had already 
pushed out by small raids and rushes half-way to the copse 
before the attack, and when the signal to go forward came 
they made the rest of the way very quickly, so that the copse 
fell. The enemy here fought hard, and had cover in con- 
crete emplacements, with underground entries. Beyond he 
held out stoutly under machine-gun and rifle barrage. Mean- 



248 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

while, on the extreme right of attack were the Austrahans 
and New-Zealanders in the ground below Warneton. It 
was difficult country. The enemy had gone to great trouble 
to wire his hedges and camouflage the shell-holes with wire 
netting, below which he hid machine-guns and snipers. The 
village of La Basseville, like all the places we call villages, 
a mere huddle of broken bricks, had already been taken once 
and lost in a counter-attack. Now it was the New-Zealand- 
ers who took it. The same thing happened as at Hollebeke, 
The enemy refused to leave his dug-outs and was bombed 
to death in them. "Can't make any use of the cellars," 
came a message through, "as they are choked with dead." 
Not far from La Basseville was the stump of an old wind- 
mill standing lonely on a knoll. Because of its observation 
it was important to get, and it was the Australians who cap- 
tured it after hard fighting. At 9.30 in the morning the 
Germans came out in waves across the Warneton-Gapaard 
road and so encircled the windmill that the Australians had 
to draw back and leave it. But at midnight, after it had 
been shelled for several hours, they went back, routed out 
the garrison, and now hold it again. At half-past three 
the same afternoon the New-Zealanders were counter-at- 
tacked at La Basseville, but the Germans were beaten 
back. 

So the fortunes of the day were alternating, but at the 
end of it the position became clear. We had made and 
held all the ground that we intended. Then our men dug 
in, and the rain, which had begun on the afternoon of the 
battle, grew- heavier. It has rained ever since. The ground 
is all a swamp and the shell-holes are ponds. The Army Hes 
wet, and all the foulness of Flemish weather in winter is 
upon them in August. Through the mist the enemy's shell- 
fire never ceases, and our guns reply with long bombard- 
ments and steady barrages. The walking wounded come 
back over miles of churned-up ground, dodging the shells, 
and when they get down to the clearing-stations they are 
caked with mud and very weary. War is not a blithe busi- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 249 

ness, even when the sun is shining. In this gloom and filth 
it is more miserable. 

The weather has been bad for flying men. Impossible, 
one would say, looking up at the low-lying storm-clouds. 
Yet on the day of battle our airmen went out and, baulked 
of artillery work, flew over the enemy's country and spread 
terror there. It was a flying terror which, when told in 
the barest words of these boys, is stranger than old mythical 
stories of flying horses and dragons on the wing. Imagine 
one of these winged engines swooping low over one as one 
walks along a road far from the lines, and above the roar 
of its engine the sharp crack of a revolver with a bullet 
meant for you. Imagine one of these birds hovering above 
one's cottage roof and firing machine-gun bullets down the 
chimneys, and then flying round to the front and squirting 
a stream of lead through the open door, and, after leaving 
death inside, soaring up into a rain-cloud. That, and much 
more, was done on July 31. These airmen of ours attacked 
the German troops on the march and scattered them, dropped 
bombs on their camps and aerodromes, flying so low that 
their wheels skirted the grass, and were seldom more than 
a few yards above the tree-tops. The narrative of one 
man begins with his flight over the enemy's country, cross- 
ing canals and roads as low as thirty feet, until he came to 
a German aerodrome. The men there paid no attention, 
thinking this low flier was one of theirs, until a bomb fell 
on the first shed. Then they ran in all directions panic- 
stricken. The English pilot skimmed round to the other 
side of the shed and played his machine-gun through the 
open doors, then soared a little and gave the second shed 
a bomb. He flew round and released a bomb for the third 
shed, but failed with the fourth, because the handle did not 
act quickly enough. So he spilt his bomb between the shed 
and a railway train standing still there. By this time a 
German machine-gun had got to work upon him, but he 
swooped right down upon it, scattering the gunners with a 
burst of bullets, and flew across the sheds again, firing into 



250 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

them at twenty feet. His ammunition drum was exhausted, 
and he went up to a cloud to change, and then came down 
actually to the ground, tripping across the grass on dancing 
wheels, and firing into the sheds where the mechanics were 
cowering. Then he tired of this aerodrome and flew off, 
overtaking two German officers on horses. He dived at 
them and the horses bolted. He came upon a column of 200 
troops on the march, and swooped above their heads with a 
stream of bullets until they ran into hedges and ditches. He 
was using a lot of ammunition, and went up into a cloud 
to fix another drum. Two German aeroplanes came up 
to search for him, and he flew to meet them and drove 
one down so that it crashed to earth. German sol- 
diers gathered round it, and our fellow came down to them 
and fired into their crowd. A little later he flew over a 
passenger train and pattered bullets through its windows, 
and then, having no more ammunition, went home. 

There was a boy of eighteen in one of our aerodromes the 
night before the battle, and he was very glum because he was 
not allowed to go across the German lines next day on ac- 
count of his age and inexperience. After many pleadings 
he came to his squadron commander at night in his pyjamas 
and said, "Look here, sir, can't I go?" So he was allowed 
to go, and set out in company with another pilot in another 
machine. But he soon was alone, because he missed the 
other man in a rain-storm. His first adventure was with 
a German motor-car with two officers. He gave chase, saw 
it turn into side roads, and followed. Then he came low 
and used his machine-gun. One of the officers fired an 
automatic pistol at him, so our boy thought that a good chal- 
lenge and, leaving go of his machine-gun, pulled out his own 
revolver, and there was the strangest duel between a boy 
in the air and a man in a car. The aeroplane was fifty 
feet high then, but dropped to twenty just as the car pulled 
up outside a house. The young pilot shot past, but turned 
and saw the body of one officer being dragged indoors. He 
swooped over the house and fired his machine-gun into it, 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 251 

and then sent a Very-light into the car, hoping to set it on 
fire. Presently he was attacked by a bombardment from 
machine-guns, "Archies," and light rockets, so he rose high 
and took cover in the clouds. But it was not the last epi- 
sode of his day out He saw some infantry crossing a 
wooden bridge and dived at them with rapid bursts of 
machine-gun fire. They ran like rabbits from a shot-gun, 
and when he came round again he saw four or five dead 
lying on the bridge. From the ditches men fired at him 
with rifles, so he stopped low and strafed them, and then 
went home quite pleased with himself. 

There were scores of flying men who did these things. 
The pilots of two units alone flew an aggregate of 396 
hours 25 minutes, and fired 11,258 rounds of machine-gun 
bullets at ground targets, to say nothing of Very-lights. 
Those machines were not out in France for exhibition pur- 
poses, as gentlemen now abed in England are pleased to 
think. All this sounds romantic, and certainly there is the 
romance of youthful courage and fearless spirit. But apart 
from human courage, the ugliness and foulness of war 
grow greater month by month, and if anybody speaks to me 
of war's romance I will tell him of things I have seen to-day 
and yesterday and make his blood run cold. For the sum 
of human agony is high. 

3 

The Beginning of the Rains 

August i 
A violent rain-storm began yesterday afternoon after our 
advance across the enemy's lines to the Pilkem Ridge and 
the northern curve of the Ypres salient, and it now veils all 
the battlefield in a dense mist. It impedes the work of our 
airmen and makes our artillery co-operation with the in- 
fantry more difficult, and adds to the inevitable hardships 
of our men out there in the new lines where the ground has 



252 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

been fcratered by our shell-fire into one wild quagmire of 
pits. To the enemy it is not altogether a blessing. His air- 
men get no observation of our movements, and his gunners 
do not find their targets, while his poor, wretched infantry, 
lying out in open ground or in woods where they get no 
cover from our fire, must be in a frightful condition, unable 
to get food because of our barrages behind them, and wet 
to the skin. 

The enemy's command has been unable to organize any 
effective counter-attacks, and so far has sent forward small 
bodies of storm troops moving vaguely to uncertain objec- 
tives and smashed by our fire before they have reached onr 
lines. There were many of these attacks yesterday. Agaii. ot 
the Lancashire regiments of the 15th and the Scots of the 
55th Division they were repeated all through the day, be- 
ginning at three o'clock in the afternoon, and coming again 
at eleven o'clock, 1.45, and 7.15 this morning. 

The Lehr Regiment, whom the Kaiser called his brave 
Coburgers during the battles of the Somme, were very 
severely mauled yesterday and suffered heavy losses. Both 
the 235th Division and the Third Guards Division, engaged 
by our men on the Steenbeek line, have been shattered. So 
great has been the alarm of the enemy at the menace to his 
line that he has been rushing up reserves by omnibuses and 
light railways to the firing-line over tracks which are shelled 
by us day and night. The suffering of all the German 
troops, huddled together in exposed places, must be as hide- 
ous as anything in the agony of mankind, slashed to bits by 
storms of shells and urged forward to counter-attacks which 
they know will be their death. 

I saw this morning large numbers of prisoners taken dur- 
ing the past twenty-four hours and just brought in. They 
had the look of men who have been through hell. They were 
drenched with rain, which poured down their big steel hel- 
mets. Their top-boots were full of water, which squelched 
out at every step, and their sunken eyes stared out of ash- 
grey faces with the look of sick and hunted animals. Many 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 253 

of them had cramp in the stomach through long exposure 
and hunger before being captured, and they groaned loudly 
and piteously. Many of them wept while being interro- 
gated, protesting bitterly that they hated the war and wanted 
nothing but peace. They have no hope of victory for their 
country. An advance into Russia fills them with no new il- 
lusions, but seems to them only a lengthening of the general 
misery. They do not hide the sufferings of their people at 
home, and say that in the towns there is bitter want, and only 
in the rural districts is there enough to eat. In the field they 
are filled with gloomy forebodings, and live in terror of our 
tremendous gun-fire. The older men, non-commissioned of- 
ficers who have come back after wounds, and other soldiers 
of long training, say that the boys of the young classes 
who are now filling up the ranks have no staying power 
under shell-fire and no fighting spirit. Among the prison- 
ers I saw to-day I think about a quarter of them, or per- 
haps a little less, were these young boys, anaemic-looking 
lads, with terror in their eyes. The others were more 
hardy-looking men, though pale and worn. It is certain 
that they made no great fight yesterday when our men were 
near them, except when they still had cover in concrete em- 
placements. And it is no wonder that all fight has gone 
out of them. Some even of our own men were startled and 
stunned by the terrific blast of our gun-fire. Some of these 
men have told me that when they went forward to get into 
line before the attack, -they had to pass through mile after 
mile of our batteries, the heavy guns behind, and gradually 
reaching the lighter batteries forward, until they arrived 
at the field-guns, so thickly placed that at some points they 
were actually wheel to wheel. The night was dark, but 
there was no darkness among these batteries. Their flashes 
lit up their neighbourhood with lurid torches, blinding the 
eyes of the troops on the march, and all about the air rocked 
with the blast of their fire and the noise was so great that 
men were deafened. As the troops went forward for five 
or six miles to the assembly-lines flights of shells passed over 



254 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

their heads in a great rush through space, and it was terri- 
fying even to men like one of those I met to-day, who has 
become famihar with the noise of gun-fire since the early 
days of Ypres and the fury of the Somme. But the worst 
came when the field-guns began their rapid fire before yes- 
terday's dawn. It was like the fire of machine-guns in its 
savage sweep, but instead of machine-gun bullets they were 
i8-pounder shells, and each report from thousands of guns 
was a sharp, ear-splitting crack. 

An Irish fellow who described his own adventures to me 
as he lay wounded and told his tale as vividly as a great 
orator, because of the perfect truth and simplicity of each 
phrase, said that he and all his comrades hurried to get away 
from their own lines when the signal of attack came in order 
to escape from the awful noise. They preferred the greater 
quietude of the enemy's positions. They went across blasted 
ground. It had been harrowed by the sweep of fire. 
Trenches had disappeared, concrete emplacements had been 
overturned, breastworks had been flung like straws to the 
wind. The only men who lived were those who were hud- 
dled in sections of trench which were between the bar- 
rage-lines of our fire. Our men had no fear of what the 
enemy could do to them. They went forward to find crea- 
tures eager to escape from this blazing hell. It was only 
in redoubts like the Frezenberg Redoubt which had escaped 
destruction that the German machine-gunners still fought 
and gave trouble. Many of the enemy must have been 
buried alive with machine-guns and trench-mortars and bomb 
stores. But-there were other dead not touched by shell-fire, 
nor by any bullet. They had been killed by our gas attack 
which had gone before the battle. Rows of them lay clasp- 
ing their gas-masks, and had not been quick enough before 
the vapour of death reached them. But others, with their 
gas-masks on, were dead. One of our men tells me that 
he came across the bodies of a group of Gernian officers. 
They belonged to a brigade staff, and they were all masked, 
with tin beast-like nozzles, and they were all stone dead. It 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 255 

is the vengeance of the gods for that gas, foul and damnable, 
which they used against us first in the second battle of 
Ypres and ever since. It is the worst weapon of modem 
warfare, and has added the blackest terror to all this slaugh- 
ter of men. "J 
Because there was not great fighting with infantry yes-' 
terday, it must not be thought that our men had an easy 
time. The enemy was quick to, put down his barrage, and 
although it was not anything like our annihilating fire, it 
was bad enough, as any shell-fire is. I met some young 
Scots of the Gordons and Camerons to-day, who had been 
through an episode of a thrilling kind, which was horrible 
while it lasted. When the signal for attack came yester- 
day, they were a little mad, like some of their comrades, 
because they said they saw the Germans running away on the 
other side of our wall of shells. Without waiting for the 
barrage to creep forward, these Scots ran forward right 
among our own shells, and, by some miracle, many of them 
escaped being hit, and went forward in pursuit. A party 
of about a hundred went right beyond their goal and found 
themselves isolated and out of touch with the main body. 
They were heavily shelled and attacked by bombing parties. 
They sent runners back asking for reinforcements, but none 
came because of their far-flung position. They tried to sig- 
nal for an artillery barrage to protect them, but this call was 
not seen. They ran out of ammunition, and saw that death 
was coming close to them. It touched some men with great 
chunks of hot shell, and they fell dead in their shell-craters. 
Other men were buried by the bursts of 59' s. These boys 
of the 8/ioth Gordons were proud. They did not want to 
retire, though they knew they had gone too far, but at last, 
when all their officers had been killed but one, the order was 
given to this little remnant of men to save their lives and 
get back if they could. They went back through heavy 
fire, and I talked with two of them this morning, happy 
to find themselves alive and bright-eyed fellows still. It 
is extraordinary what escapes many of them have had. A 



256 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

group of them in the farthest line of advance lay down in 
craters under a rapid sweep of machine-gun fire from a re- 
doubt in front of them. They watched over the edge of 
their craters how two Tanks came up, heaving and lurch- 
ing over the tossed earth, until they were within gun-range 
of the redoubt. Then they opened fire. But the enemy's 
gunners had seen them, and tried to get them with direct 
hits. Most of the shells fell short all around those English 
lads hiding in the craters. Some of these were buried and 
some killed. But the others held on to their ground, which 
is still in our hands. 

t The stretcher-bearers were magnificent, and worked all 
day and night searching out the wounded and carrying them 
back under fire. Many of the German prisoners gladly lent 
a hand in this work on their way back. At the dressing- 
stations to-day I saw them giving pickaback to men — ours — 
who were wounded about the legs and feet. They prefer 
this work to fighting. 

After yesterday's battle our line includes the whole of 
the Pilkem Ridge and the ground in the valley beyond to 
the line of the Steenbeek river, and southwards in a curve 
that slices off the old Ypres salient. It has been a heavy 
blow to the enemy. Now it is all rain and mud and blood 
and beastliness. 

4 
Pill-Boxes and Machine-Guns 

August 3 
The weather is still frightful. It is difficult to believe that 
we are in August. Rather it is like the foulest weather of 
a Flemish winter, and all the conditions which we knew 
through so many dreary months during three winters of 
war up here in the Ypres sailent are with us again. The 
fields are quagmires, and in shell-crater land, which is 
miles deep round Ypres, the pits have filled with water. The 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 257 

woods loom vaguely through a wet mist, and road traffic 
labours through rivers of slime. It is hard luck for our 
fighting men. But in spite of repeated efforts the enemy- 
has not succeeded in his counter-attacks, after our line with- 
drew somewhat at the end of the first day south and south- 
east of St.-Julien. In my first accounts of the battle I did 
not give full measure to the hardness of the fighting in 
which some of our troops were engaged, nor to the stub- 
bornness of the enemy's resistance. It is now certain that, 
whereas many of the German infantry, terror-stricken by 
our bombardment, surrendered easily enough, others made 
good use of strong defences not annihilated by our fire, and 
put up a desperate defence. Fresh troops, like the 221st Di- 
vision, were flung in by the German command in the after- 
noon of the first day and made repeated attacks, under 
cover of the mist, against our men, who were tired after 
twenty-four hours in the zone of fire, who in some sectors 
had suffered heavily, but who fought still with a courage 
which defied defeat. A commanding officer of a Lanca- 
shire battalion went to meet some of his men coming back 
yesterday. They were wet and caked with mud and un- 
shaven and dead-beat, and they had lost many comrades, but 
they had the spirit to pull themselves up and smile with a 
light in their eyes when the commanding officer said he was 
proud of them, because they had done all that men could, 
and one of them called out cheerily, "When shall we go on 
again, sir?" An officer who was left last out of his bat- 
talion to hold out in an advanced position said to the padre, 
who has just visited him. in hospital, *T hope the General 
was not disappointed with us." The General, I am sure, was 
not disappointed with these men of the 55th Division. 
No one could think of them without enthusiasm and ten- 
derness, marvelling at their spirit and at the fight they 
made in tragic hours. Because it was a tragedy to them 
that after gaining ground they had been asked to take, and 
not easily nor without losses, they should have to fall back 



258 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and fight severe rear-guard actions to cover a necessary- 
withdrawal. 

These Lancashire men, with many men o£ the Liverpool 
battalions, had to attack from Wieltje through successive 
systems of trenches. This ground is just to the right of St- 
Julien and to the left of Frezenberg, below the Graven- 
stafel Spur, Zonnebeke, and Langemarck. The way lay 
past a number of German strong points — Beck House, Plum 
Farm, Pound Farm, and Square Farm — once small farm- 
steads, long blown to bits, but fortified by concrete strong- 
holds with walls of concrete two yards thick. Our gun- 
fire wrecked all the ground about them and toppled over a 
few of these places, but left a number untouched, and that 
was the cause of the trouble. Each one had to be taken by 
a separate action led by our young platoon commanders, 
and it was a costly series of small engagements — costly to 
officers, especially, as always happens at such times. These 
young subalterns of ours handled their men not only gal- 
lantly, but skilfully, and the men followed their lead with 
cunning as well as pluck, and got round the concrete 
works by rifle-fire and bombing until they could rush them 
at close quarters. In this way two strongly held farms were 
taken, while from the right the Lancashire men were swept 
by enfilade fire from a third farm until its garrison was 
routed out and i6o of them captured. There was hard 
fighting farther on for a line of trenches where some of 
the wire was still uncut, with machine-gun fire rattling from 
the left flank. . 

But the fiercest fighting came after that against another 
series of those concrete forts, among them the Pommern 
Redoubt, where separate actions had again to be made by 
little groups of men under platoon commanders. The 
enemy's machine-gunners served their weapons to the last. 
Xn this ground, too, were five batteries of German field- 
guns, who fired upon our men until they were within 500 
yards. The gunners had to be shot down, and our men 
streamed past the guns in perfect order just as they had 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 259 

rehearsed the attack beforehand, sending back reports, 
carrying through the whole operation as though on a field- 
day behind the lines. Yet by that time their strength had 
been ebbing away, and many of them had fallen. They 
reached the extreme limit of their advance with outposts 
at two more fortified farms — Wurst and Aviatik Farms — 
from which two days later a delayed report came back from 
the last remaining officer of the party that he had reached 
this high ground in front of Wurst Farm, and that his bat- 
talion was badly depleted. That was an heroic little mes- 
sage, but a few hours later that ground was no longer in 
our hands. The troops of the 39th Division on the left of 
the Lancashire men had found some trouble with uncut 
wire, and the enemy developed a strong counter-attack from 
the north, taking advantage of that exposed flank. They 
prepared for attack by a heavy artillery barrage, controlled 
by low-flying aeroplanes and co-operating with the infantry. 
At the same time another counter-attack came down from 
the high ground on the right to strike between the Lanca- 
shire men of the 55th Division and the Scottish troops of 
the 15th on their right. It was decided to withdraw to a 
better defensive line, and 160 Lancashire Fusiliers got into 
Schuler Farm, and held it against heavy odds in order to 
cover this movement. They stayed there, using machine- 
guns and rifles until only thirty of them were left stand- 
ing, and all around them were dead and dying. Their work 
was done, for they had held out long enough to protect 
the withdrawing lines, and the thirty survivors decided to 
fight their way back through an enemy fast closing in upon 
them. So they left the farm, and of the thirty ten reached 
the new line. Since then the enemy has made repeated 
attacks from the high ground on the right, and especially 
against the Pommern Redoubt, but every time he has been 
cut up by the fire of our guns and rifles. I hear that this 
afternoon he is again massing for another attempt, accord- 
ing to the orders given to the German troops that they must 



260 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

get back all the ground they have lost, and at all costs, by 
August 3, which is to-day. 

I have already told in a general way in previous dis- 
patches how the Scots of the 15th Division farther south 
than the Lancashire men fought their way up to the Frezen- 
berg Redoubt, coming under a blast of machine-gun fire 
from a neighbouring farm until they captured its garrison, 
and then going on to two other enemy redoubts. They 
had the same trouble as the Lancashire men with these 
concrete forts, but attacked them with stubborn courage, 
and put them out of action. One of my good friends was 
wounded in front of one of these emplacements in com- 
mand of his battalion of 8/ioth Gordons, and it was by 
an odd chance that I saw him as he lay wounded in a 
casualty clearing-station a few hours later. *T hear my 
men have done well," he said. They did as well as they 
have always done in many great battles, and not only well, 
but wonderfully, and they went as far as they were allowed 
to go, and held on in their old grim way when things were 
at their worst. The whole line of the Scottish troops below 
the Langemarck-Zonnebeke road was attacked at two in 
the afternoon, or thereabouts, and their advanced line grad- 
ually withdrew under a fierce fire. At six o'clock the enemy 
slightly penetrated the advance line, driving the Gordons 
back a hundred yards, but the Camerons drove them out 
and away. This was on a front to the east of St.-Julien 
and south of Zonnebeke. 

The general position remains the same. The weather re- 
mains the same, and the mud and the discomfort of men 
living under incessant rain and abominable shell-fire do 
not decrease; nevertheless, they have smashed up attack 
after attack, and their spirit is unbreakable. The enemy is 
sufifering from the same evil conditions, and his only advan- 
tage is that perhaps he has better cover in which to assemble 
his men, and that, owing to his defeat, he is nearer to his 
base, so that they have not so far to tramp through the 
swamps in order to get up supplies of food for guns and 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 261 

men. As usual, we have behind us a wide stretch of shell- 
broken ground, which, in foul weather like this, becomes a 
slough. 

August 5 
For the first time for four days and nights the rain has 
stopped, and there is even a pale gleam of sunshine, though 
the sky is still heavy with rain-clouds. Oh, foul weather! 
What a curse it has been to our men! But the guns have 
never ceased their fire because of the rain and the mist, and 
all last night again and to-day there has been tremendous 
gunning. 

Our gunners have been working at high tension for sev- 
eral weeks, and the admiration of the infantry goes out 
to these men who, though they do not go over the top, are 
under heavy fire from German counter-battery work and 
bombed by German aeroplanes and strained by the enor- 
mous responsibility of protecting the infantry and keeping 
up barrage-fire without rest In this battle the gunners 
have done marvellously, to the very limit of human endur- 
ance. As for the infantry, words are not good enough 
to describe the grit of them all. Apart from all the in- 
evitable beastliness of battle, they have had to fight in this 
filthy weather, and it has made it a thousand times worse. 
In August men don't expect to get drowned in shell-holes, 
nor to get stuck to the armpits in mud before they reach 
the first German line. It was not as bad as that everywhere, 
but exactly that in parts of the line even before the heavy 
rains came on. The men of the 8th and 30th Divisions who 
attacked over ground like this east of Zillebeke went 
through abominable adventures. It was almost pitch-dark 
when they went forward, and the first thing that happened 
was that battalions became hopelessly mixed because of the 
darkness and the nature of the ground ; and the second thing 
that the barrage went ahead of them so that they had to 
struggle behind in the morass unsupported by its fire, and 
shot at by Germans on their flanks. 



262 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Two lines of trenches known to our men as Jackdaw 
Support and Jackdaw Reserve were captured without much 
difficulty as far as the enemy was concerned, about eighty 
prisoners being taken in them, but with enormous difficulty 
on account of the boggy ground. Imagine these men, 
loaded up with packs and rifles and sand-bags and shovels, 
slipping and falhng among the shell-pits, which were full 
of mud, water, and wire. Fellows stopped to pull out 
their comrades and were dragged in after them. It took 
them three-quarters of an hour to get over two lines of 
undefended trenches, whole platoons getting bogged in them 
and slipping back when they tried to climb out. It was a 
trying time for the officers who saw the barrage of our 
guns getting away ahead. Beyond them was high ground, 
from which German machine-gun and rifle fire swept them, 
and not far away German snipers potted our men, and espe- 
cially our officers, as they climbed in and out of shell- 
craters. Two officers of the Manchesters had been killed 
by one of these fellows when a private crept out alone on 
his flank, stole round him very quietly, pounced and killed 
him. It took two and a half hours to get to Jackdaw Re- 
serve Trench in Sanctuary Wood, and the enemy's riflemen 
who had been firing at close range then ran back, or as 
our men say, "hopped it." The Menin road from Ypres 
runs through the high ground just here, and it was about 
here that the hardest time came for the 30th Division, be- 
cause of the fierce machine-gun fire. It was here, also, that 
many gallant deeds were done by men who had lost their 
officers, and by the officers who had lost their men but col- 
lected stragglers and groups from mixed units to get on 
with the attack. A young private soldier of a machine- 
gun company advanced with his Lewis gun and by rapid 
fire put a German machine-gun out of action, so that a 
bombing party could get on. A lance-corporal of the Man- 
chesters rallied up stragglers, organized groups, and rushed 
some of the German strong points. A captain behaved 
throughout the battle with the most fearless gallantry, and 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 

when his men wavered and fell back before the blast of 
machine-gun bullets that drove across the Menin road, ral- 
lied them and gathered up lads from other units, and cap- 
tured two strong points with these storming parties. He 
was wounded in this action, but paid no heed to that, and 
continued to lead his men. It was here that the great tun- 
nel ran across the Menin road, from which forty-one Ger- 
mans were taken. To the right of the road this side of 
Inverness Copse and the Dumbarton Lakes stood Stirling 
Castle on the high ground of a semi-circular ridge sur- 
rounded by deep shell-pits. The "castle" itself was just 
a heap of broken bricks on this commanding ground, and 
behind those bricks were German machine-gunners, who 
served their weapons until our men were close to them. 
Then they "hopped it" again, but stayed on the other side 
of the ridge, firing at any men who showed themselves over 
the crest. Our men fought round the castle for hours, 
heavily shelled as soon as the enemy's gunners knew it was 
in our hands, and meeting counter-attacks which developed 
later. 

A thousand and more acts of courage were done in those 
hours by men who knew that their comrades' lives and 
their own depended upon "getting on with the job," as they 
call it. It was necessary to get reports back to brigade 
headquarters at all costs, so that supplies and supports 
might be sent up, and to get into touch with battalion and 
company commanders from the advanced line. It was not 
easy either to write or to send down these messages. Wires 
were cut and runners killed. But it had to be done. A 
company sergeant-major, though lightly wounded first and 
then badly wounded after leading his men up under a sweep 
of machine-gun bullets, sat down in the mud and scribbled 
out his report. There was a young Irish private in these 
Manchesters who did wonderful work as a runner with 
these messages. He volunteered whenever there was a 
dangerous bit of work to do, exposing himself over and 
over again, and gathering up stragglers to fill up gaps in 



264i FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the line of defence. A sergeant acted as runner when two 
of his own had been killed, and got through under intense 
fire. And one of these runners had a great adventure all 
to himself on his journey under fire. This young private 
was going up with a message when he saw something move 
outside a dug-out. He went forward cautiously, and saw 
a German soldier disappear into the dark entry. The Man- 
chester lad was all alone, but he followed the German into 
the hole, down a flight of mud stairs and into an under- 
ground cave. He stood face to face with eighteen men. 
One of them was a non-commissioned officer. They stared 
back at him with brooding eyes, as though wondering 
whether they should kill him. He shouted at them, "Now, 
then, come out, and look sharp about it," and made a sign 
to the door. They put their hands up and said, "Kam- 
erad." "Well, then, get out," said the boy. They filed 
out past him, and he waited till the last had gone. Then 
he went up the mud stairs to open ground again, and saw 
that the eighteen men had scattered, finding that he was all 
alone. He shouted to them and fired his rifle over their 
heads, so that they thought twice of escape, and then came 
back to him meekly. So he formed them up, and marched 
behind them down to the prisoners' cage, where he took 
his recipt for eighteen prisoners. 

There was now great shelling, and the enemy was mass- 
ing for a counter-attack. Through this fire a young Irish 
officer in the machine-gun section brought up nine out of 
his twelve guns- in order to meet the attack, and without 
that great courage of his the position would have been very 
bad. A sergeant of machine-gunners stood in a bit of a 
trench with his team when a shell burst, killing two men 
and wounding others. He stood there, splashed with blood 
and in great danger of death, without losing his nerve or 
his spirit, and after helping the wounded he "carried on" 
and kept his guns in action. 

Meanwhile, down at brigade headquarters the situation 
was very obscure; so obscure that the brigadier sent up a 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 265 

young captain, his brigade major, to find out the situation 
and report on it. Not a safe and easy job to do at such 
a time; but this officer, whom I met to-day, went up to 
Stirhng Castle, where he found mixed units still under 
heavy machine-gun fire, and only one or two officers, with- 
out knowledge of the general situation owing to the diffi- 
culty of getting communications. The brigade major reor- 
ganized the situation with a cool head and a fine courage, 
collected parties of mixed riflemen, and took them to the 
high ground, where there was a good field of fire, and then, 
with his orderly, moved across the Menin road, which was 
at that time unprotected. He organized the support of 
this, and on the way came across the entrance to the tunnel 
under the road. He stopped and listened. It seemed to 
him that he could hear movements and voices. He went 
into the tunnel, and heard and saw a German there. He 
covered him with a revolver, and the man put his hands 
up. But the German was not alone. There was a shuffling- 
of feet farther down, and the German said, "There are 
four of us farther in the tunnel." The brigade major went 
farther down^ with his revolver ready, and met the four 
men and told them in French and English that he would 
kill them if they moved a step. They surrendered, two of 
them speaking good English, and the brigade major's or- 
derly took one of their rifles, not being armed himself, 
and with that weapon escorted them back. They were 
men of the 238th Regiment, and had only been in that line 
twenty-four hours. It was the brigade major's report that 
cleared up the situation from his headquarters and made it 
more easy of control. 

Some Scottish troops who fought alongside the Man- 
chesters at Stirling Castle behaved with equal valour. They 
endured long and intense shelling, while through the murk 
and smoke enemy aeroplanes flew very low, firing their 
machine-guns at the troops, batteries, and mule convoys, 
with a good imitation of our own air pilots. What I have 
told so far covers only a small section of the Front, but 



266 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

I have now given a broad picture of all the length of bat- 
tle, and these episodes I have just described will give a 
closer idea of the way in which all our soldiers have been 
fighting in this country around Ypres, and of all they have 
suffered in the foulest weather I have ever seen in summer. 

August 4 
The Tanks have justified themselves again, and won their 
spurs — spurs as big as gridirons — in the battle of Flanders. 
They had plenty of chance to show what they could do. 

As I described yesterday, the way of our advance was 
hindered by a number of little concrete forts built in the 
ruin of farmsteads which had withstood our gun-fire. At 
Plum Farm and Apple Villa, and in stronger, more elabo- 
rate, fortified points, like the Frezenberg and Pommern 
Castle and Pommern Redoubt, the enemy's machine-gun- 
ners held out when everything about them was chaos and 
death, and played a barrage of bullets on our advancing 
men. Platoons and half -platoons attacked them in detail 
at a great cost of life, and it was in such places that the 
Tanks were of most advantage. It was at Pommern Castle, 
east of St.-Julien, that one of the Tanks did best. Don't 
imagine the castle as a kind of Windsor, with big walls 
and portcullis and high turrets, but as slabs of concrete in 
a huddle of sand-bags above a nest of deep dug-outs. On 
the other side of it was Pommern Redoubt, the same in 
style of defence. Our men were fighting hard for the 
castle, and having a bad time under its fire. The Tank 
came to help them, and advanced under a swish of bullets 
to the German emplacement, lurching up the piled bags over 
the heaped-up earth, and squatting on top like a grotesque 
creature playing the old game of "I'm the King of the 
Castle; get down, you dirty rascals." The dirty rascals, 
who were German soldiers, unshaven and covered in wet 
mud, did not like the look of their visitor, which was firing 
with great ferocity. They fled to the cover of Pommern 
Redoubt beyond. Then the Tank moved back to let the 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 267 

infantry get on, but as soon as it had turned its back the 
Germans, with renewed pluck, took possession of the castle 
again. The men who were fighting round about again gave 
a signal to the Tank to get busy. So it came back, and" 
with the infantry on its flanks made another assault, so 
that the enemy fled again. Pommern Redoubt was attacked 
in the same way with good help from the Tank. 

The Frezenberg Redoubt was another place where the 
Tanks were helpful, and they did good work at Westhoek, 
the remnant of a village to the right of that. One of them 
attacked and helped to capture a strong point west of St.- 
Julien, from which a good many Germans came out to sur- 
render, and afterwards some Tanks went through the vil- 
lage, but had to get out again in a hurry to escape capture 
in the German counter-attacks. It was not easy to get 
back in a hurry, as by that hour in the afternoon the rain 
had turned the ground to swamp, and the Tanks sank deep 
in it, with wet mud half-way up their flanks, and slipped 
and slithered back when they tried to struggle out. Many 
of the officers and crews had to get out of their steel forts, 
risking heavy shelling and machine-gun fire to dig out their 
way, and in the neighbourhood of St.-Julien they worked 
for two hours in the open to de-bog their Tank while Ger- 
man gunners tried to destroy them by direct hits. In a 
farm somewhere in this neighbourhood no fewer than sixty 
Germans came out with their hands up in surrender as 
soon as the Tank was at close quarters, and a story is told, 
though I haven't the exact details, that in another place 
the mere threat of a Tank's approach was enough to decide 
a party of eight tO' give in. It is certain beyond all doubt 
that the enemy's infantry has a great fear of these ma- 
chines, and does not see any kind of humour in them. In 
this battle there is not a single case of an attack upon a 
Tank by infantry, though we know that they have been 
given special training behind their lines with dummy Tanks 
according to definite rules laid down by the German Com- 
mand. 



268 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

One fight did take place with a Tank, and it is surely the 
most fantastic duel that has ever happened in war. It was 
queer enough, as I described a day or two ago, when one 
of our airmen flew over a motor-car, and engaged in a 
revolver duel with a German officer, but even that strange 
picture is less weird than when a German aeroplane flew 
low over a Tank, and tried to put out its eyes by bursts 
of machine-gun bullets. Imagine the scene — that muddy 
monster crawling through the slime, with sharp stabs of 
fire coming from its flanks, and above an engine, with 
wings, swooping round and about it like an angry albatross, 
and spattering its armour with bullets. It was an imequal 
fight, for the Tank just ignored that waspish" machine-gun 
fire, and went on its way with only a scratch or two. The 
Tanks were in action around the marshes and woodlands 
by Shrewsbury Forest. Here, as I have already said, there 
was very severe infantry fighting, in which the Leicesters, 
Northamptons, and above all the Middlesex Regiment had 
desperate engagements, and the enemy made many counter- 
attacks, so that the progress of our men was slow and' 
difficult. The Tanks helped them as best they could. 

So goes the tale of the Tanks on the first day of the 
battle of Flanders. It will be seen from what I have writ- 
ten that they gave good help to the troops. The pilots and 
crews behaved with splendid gallantry, and not only took 
great risks, but endured to the last extremity of fatigue 
in that narrow, hot space where they work their engines 
and their guns. 

5 
The Song of the Cockchafers 

August 8 
One of the most bitter blows to Germany, if she has heard 
the news, must be the destruction of the famous regiment 
of "Maikaefer," or Cockchafers, by our Welsh troops. The 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 269 

Kaiser called them his brave Coburgers. In Germany the 
very children sang in the streets about them. And proud 
of their own exploits, they had their own soldier poets 
who wrote songs about the regiment, tO' which they marched 
through Belgium and France and Galicia. I saw one of 
these songs yesterday, picked up on the battlefield near 
Pilkem. It was written by one Paul Zimmermann of theirs, 
and was printed in a leaflet sold at ten pfennigs (a penny). 
It tells how the Cockchafers come out in the spring and 
how the children sing when they come. They are ready 
for battle then, wherever it may be. The call comes for 
them wherever there is the hardest fighting, sO' the Cock- 
chafers swarmed through Belgium, and taught the French 
a lesson, and pressed after the wicked English, who — so 
the lying legend goes — used dumdum bullets, and swept 
back the Russians through Galicia. Old Hindenburg calls 
for them every time when there are brave deeds to be done. 
I have copied out two verses for those who read German : 

Der Mai der bringt uns Sonnenschein, 

Er bringt uns Bluhtenpracht ; 
Der Mai der bringt uns Kaeferlein 

Viel tausend bUer Nacht; 
Und von der Kinderlippen klingts : 

"Maikaefer, fliege, iiieg." 
Und durich den Friihlinges jubel dringts: 

"Dein Vater ist im Krieg." 

Uns Garde Fusiliere nennt 

Maikaefer jeder Mund, 
Weil unser stoUes Regiment 

Im Mai stets fertig stand. 

Well, old Hindenburg will call in vain now for his Cock- 
chafers, the Guard Fusilier Regiment of the 3rd Guards 
Division, for nearly six hundred of them are in our hands 
and others lie dead upon the ground near Pilkem. They 
had relieved the looth Infantry Reserve Regiment on the 



270 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

night of July 29, and lay three battalions deep in their 
trench systems across the Yser Canal north-east of Boe- 
singhe, scattered thinly in the shell-craters which were all 
that was left of the trenches in the front lines, more densely 
massed in the support lines, and defending a number of 
concrete emplacements and dug-outs behind. The 9th 
Grenadier Regiment and a battalion of the Lehr Regiment 
reinforced the Cockchafers and lay out in the open be- 
hind the Langemarck — Gheluvelt line, and in the support 
lines a battalion of the Lehr of the 3rd Guards Division 
had already relieved a regiment of the 392nd Infantry Re- 
serve Regiment. Some sections of the 3rd Battalion of the 
9th Grenadier Regiment had been sent forward from 
Langemarck to act as sniping posts, and two special ma- 
chine-gun detachments were also pushed up to check our 
assault. They were enough to defend this part of the Pil- 
kem Ridge, and the ground itself was in their favour as 
our men lay in the hollow with their backs to the Yser 
Canal, across which all their supports and supplies had to' 
pass. 

What was in the favour of the Welsh was that they knew 
the ground in front of them in every detail from air photo- 
graphs and from night and day raids, having lived in front 
of it for several months, digging and tunnelling so as to 
get cover from ceaseless fire, and storing up a gr^at desire 
to get even with the enemy for all they had suflfered. They 
had suffered great hardships and great perils, intensified 
before the battle because of violent shelling by high explo- 
sives and gas-shells, so that when the hour for attack came 
they had been hard tried already. It made no difference 
to the pace and order of their assault. Our bombardment 
had been overwhelming, and the heavy barrage which sig- 
nalled the assault was, according to all these Welshmen, 
perfect. They followed it very closely, so closely that 
they were on and over the Cockchafers before they could 
organize any kind of defence. Many of the enemy's ma- 
chine-guns had been smashed and buried. Those still in- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 271 

tact were never brought into action, as their gunners had 
no time to get out of the concrete shelters in which they 
were huddled to escape from the annihilating fire. 

It was in these places that most of the prisoners were 
taken — there and in a big trench, ten feet wide and twelve 
deep, on the outskirts of Pilkem village, where there is no 
village at all. The Cockchafers came out dazed, and gave 
themselves up mostly without a show of fighting. In some 
of their concrete shelters, like those at Mackensen Farm — 
don't imagine any buildings there — and Gallwitz Farm 
and Boche House and Zouave House, there were stores of 
ammunition, with many shells and trench-mortars. 

So the Welsh went on in waves, sending back the pris- 
oners on their way, through Pilkem to the high ground by 
the iron cross beyond, and then down the slopes to the 
Steenbeek stream. On the left were the Royal Welsh Fusi- 
liers, who took the ground of Pilkem itself. On the right 
were men of the Welsh Regiment. In the ground beyond 
Pilkem they found the regimental headquarters in finely 
built dug-outs, but the staff had fled to save their skins. 
There was another big dug-out near by used by the enemy 
as a dressing-station. It had room enough for a hundred 
men. There were fifty men. The Welsh swarmed round 
it — thirty wounded and twenty unwounded Germans. The 
doctor in charge was a good fellow, and, after surrender- 
ing his own men, attended to some of the wounded Welsh. 
Two machine-guns and sixteen prisoners were taken out 
of a place called Jolie Farm, and thirty prisoners out of 
Rudolf Farm — concrete kennels in a chaos of craters — 
and three officers and forty-seven men came out of the 
ruins of a house somewhere near the Iron Cross. All the 
Welsh troops behaved with great courage, and a special 
word is due to the runners, who carried messages back 
under fire, and to the stretcher-bearers, who rescued the 
wounded utterly regardless of their own risks. After- 
wards the mule drivers and leaders were splendid, bringing 
up supplies under heavy barrage fire. Wales did well that 



£72 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

day, and the Welsh miners, who had already proved them- 
selves as great diggers and great tunnellers and very brave 
men, showed themselves cool and fearless in the assault. 

August 6 

I am now able to mention more of the troops whose ad- 
ventures I have described in previous dispatches, in addition 
to the Guards and the Welsh, who' in a great assault, hardly 
checked by the enemy, captured the heights of Pilkem 
and went down the slopes beyond to the Steenbeek stream. 

The Manchesters, with Royal Scots, Royal Irish Rifles, 
and Durham Light Infantry of the 8th Division, were 
amongst those who attacked Stirling Castle below Inverness 
Copse, as I narrated in full detail yesterday, with the in- 
cident of the runner who captured eighteen prisoners in a 
dug-out and of the young brigade major who' reorganized 
the position and found five Germans in the great tunnel 
under the Menin road. 

As I have already said, it was the men of Lancashire with 
battalions of the Liverpool Regiment of the 55th Division 
who went up from Wieltje against the concrete forts, where 
they fought in many independent little actions under platoon 
commanders, who shot down the gunners of five German 
batteries, and went forward as though on the drill-ground, 
in spite of heavy losses and great fire, to Wurst Farm and 
the high ground below the Gravenstafel, until they were 
forced to fall back somewhat under a heavy German coun- 
ter-attack, when 160 men covered the withdrawal, and ten 
alone got back*. 

Farther south, they were Scots of the 15th Division who 
attacked the Frezenberg — Gordons and Camerons among 
them — and farther south still on their right were Sher- 
wood Foresters and others of the 39th Division, who had 
some of the hardest fighting of the day, up through Hooge, 
that place of old ill-fame, round Bellewaerde Lake and 
across the Menin road to the Westhoek Ridge. 

It was these Scots and these English who bore the brunt 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 273 

of the great German counter-attack on the afternoon of 
August I. After fighting their way forward past the pill- 
box emplacements or concrete redoubts with a stiff and 
separate fight at the ruin of an estaminet on the cross-roads 
at Westhoek, where a sergeant and ten or twelve men cap- 
tured forty of the enemy, the Sherwood Foresters and 
their comrades took "cover" during the night, exposed to 
fierce shell-fire and drenched in the rain, now falling 
steadily, and filling the shell-craters with mud and water, 
so that men were up to their waist in them. It was at about 
2.30 on the following afternoon that the enemy developed! 
his counter-attack from the direction of Bremen Redoubt 
and the high ground beyond our line, taking advantage of 
the mist to assemble and get forward. It was the critical 
hour of the battle. 

The enemy's attack was preceded by a heavy artillery 
barrage, and by an incessant and wide-stretching blast of 
machine-gun fire. His assaulting troops drove first at the 
Midland men south of the Roulers railway, and the Sher- 
woods and Northamptons tried to hold their line by rifie- 
fire, Lewis-gun fire, and bombs. When officers fell wounded 
the non-commissioned ofTficers and men carried on and 
fought a soldiers' battle. One Lewis-gunner drove the 
enemy back from a gap in the lines and others held back 
the enemy's storm troops long enough tO' give their com- 
rades time to get into good order as far as was possible in 
a fight of this kind. The Germans forced their way for- 
ward among the shell-craters and ruins hoping to surround 
the Sherwoods and the men of Nottingham and Derby, who 
were steadily firing and fighting, so that the enemy's losses 
were not light. Meanwhile the Scots of the 15th Division 
on the left were meeting the attack and found their flank 
exposed owing to these happenings on their right. It be- 
came more and more exposed as the attack proceeded, and 
just before three o'clock the Gordons, who were in this 
perilous position, had to swing back. This movement un- 
covered the battalion headquarters, where one of the of- 



274 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ficers, acting as adjutant, had turned out his staff, which 
fought to defend the position. He then gathered all the 
Gordons in his neighbourhood and held on to the station 
buildings. Meantime the left of the Gordons had been 
swung back to form a defensive flank, and with two Vick- 
ers guns they swept the rear lines of the storm troops with 
deadly fire. The enemy fell in great numbers, but other 
waves came on and nearly reached the top of the crest upon 
which our men had formed their line. There a young of- 
ficer of the Gordons seized the critical moment of the bat- 
tle and by his rapid action proved himself a great soldier. 
With some of the Camerons he led his men forward down 
the slopes towards the advancing enemy, each man firing 
with his rifle as he advanced, making gaps in the German 
wave. The enemy stood up to this for a minute or two, but 
when the Highlanders were within fifty yards of them they 
broke and ran. As they fled our gunners, who had not seen 
the first SOS signals owing to the mist, came into action 
and inflicted great losses up on the retreating men. But the 
day was saved by the action of the Scottish infantry, who 
had learned the use of the rifle in open warfare, and who 
had been trained for this kind of action in small groups, 
acting largely on individual initiative. Many of the enemy 
were surrounded by fire, and one officer and seven men 
gained our line in safety, while the others were caught in a 
death-trap. There were moments when, but for the cour- 
age and discipline of our troops, the enemy's counter-at- 
tack had a great chance of success, and the history of this 
battle might have been less victorious for us. 

6 

Woods of Ill-Fame 

August 12 
There was violent fighting yesterday. After our success- 
ful advance at dawn across the Westhoek Ridge, when 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 275 

more than 200 prisoners were taken, the right of our attack 
in Glencorse Wood, or Schloss Park as the Germans call 
it, and among the tree-stumps which were once woods south 
of that, was heavily engaged with an enemy concealed in 
the usual concrete emplacements, and defending himself 
with well-placed machine-guns. 

Among our troops who had the hardest struggle were 
the Irish Rifles, Cheshires, Lancashire Fusiliers, North 
Lancashires, and Worcestershires of the 25th Division 
against Glencorse Wood, and the Bedfords and Queen's of 
the 1 8th Division against Inverness Copse. 

As on the ridge, the infantry came to close quarters and 
fought with bombs and rifles and bayonets, but it was 
mainly gun-fire again which decided the issues of the day 
and caused most losses on both sides. As I have said many 
times, since the battle of July 31 the enemy has massed a 
great power of artillery against us, and has apparently no 
immediate lack of ammunition. For miles the horizon was 
seething with the smoke of heavy shells. The enemy's 
barrage-fire was great Ours was greater. Between Glen- 
corse Wood and Inverness Copse, and all about Stirling 
Castle and the Frezenberg, he made a hell of fire, and 
many of our men had to pass through its fury, and not all 
passed or came back again. But afterwards the enemy's 
turn came, and masses of his men, thick waves of them, 
sent forward with orders to counter-attack, were caught 
under the fire of our guns and smashed to pieces. 

The enemy attempted five separate counter-attacks yester- 
day, and in spite of all his losses renewed his efforts this 
morning with great determination, so that, after the ex- 
haustion and ordeal of the night under continual fire, our 
men were compelled to give way in Glencorse Wood. That 
was necessary, because farther south the enemy had held 
their ground, and the copse was a salient exposed to haras- 
sing fire from large numbers of guns in the neighbourhood 
of Polygon Wood and the country east. It is a favourite 
device of the enemy to withdraw his guns on to the flanks 



276 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

of our advance, as soon as we have penetrated his lines, 
in order to check further progress, and he did this as soon 
as the battle of July 31 was fought, though he had to leave 
many of his field-guns in the mud of No Man's Land, where 
they still lie. 

This method of defence did not ensure the success of his 
counter-attacks, though it had made the progress of our 
men hard south of Glencorse Wood. It was at about mid- 
day yesterday that our troops, who had made good their 
ground along Westhoek Ridge, had to call for further help 
from the gtms. At the same time aeroplanes, taking ad- 
vantage of wonderful visibility after the rains, were above 
the German lines, and saw a great gathering of German 
troops in Nuns' Wood and Polygon Wood. The calls were 
answered by large groups of batteries over a stretch of 
country miles deep. The heavies, far behind the lines, an- 
swered with 15-inch and 12-inch shells. The 9-2's heard 
the call in the quiet fields, where wild flowers grow over 
old shell-holes. Their 8-inch brothers heard the call and 
came quick into action. Six-inch and 4-2's made reply, and 
from them broke out one great salvo, followed by long rolls 
of drum-fire. Among the shell-craters of Nuns' Wood 
there were hundreds of men lined up for attack. They had 
their rifles at the slope, and they were hung round with 
bombs and trench-spades and cloth bags with iron rations, 
and they began to move forward just as that bombardment 
opened upon them. All the shell-fire burst over them and 
into them. They were swept by it. They were killed in 
heaps. Afterwards one of our airmen flew low over that 
stricken wood where they had been, and he came back with 
his report. Never before, he said, had he seen so many dead 
men. The German soldiers were lying there in great num- 
bers. Other attempts were made to get forward, but it was 
only on the right, where there was close fighting, that the 
enemy made any progress. 

At about six in the evening there was another call on 
our gunners, and this time the report came that the enemy 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 277 

was assembling in the valley of the Hanebeek. Two bat- 
talions of them were able to advance into the open towards 
our lines before our guns found their target. Then they 
flung themselves down under this new storm of fire or tried 
to escape from it by running or plunging into shell-craters. 
There were not many who escaped. 

One of them who became a prisoner in our hands said that 
two battalions were annihilated — he used the phrase 
"wiped out." Perhaps that was an exaggeration. There 
are always some men who slip through, but in this case 
whole ranks of men were blown to bits. 

I talked to-day with some of our own wounded who came 
limping through the casualty clearing-stations. They were 
men of the Worcesters and Bedfords and Queen's, whose 
battalions I have met before after battles. One of them 
told me how he lay out all night waiting for the attack in 
the dawn on Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse. There 
are only tree-stumps there in the great white stretch of shell- 
craters, and the enemy was holding the place lightly with 
machine-guns in those pits that had been made by our 
fire. Our men were upon them quick after the barrage, and 
they were routed out of their holes before they had time 
to put up a strong defence. By bad luck, as sometimes hap- 
pens, owing to the eagerness of our men to cover as much 
ground as possible, the Irish Rifles and the North Lan- 
cashires of the 25th Division went at least 200 yards be- 
yond their goal, and were caught in our barrage, which was 
preventing supports coming up to the enemy. As soon as 
they realized their deadly error they fell back again, carrying 
their wounded. 

Later 

There was sharp hand-to-hand fighting on the Westhoek 
Ridge by the Lancashire Fusiliers, North Lancashires, and 
Cheshires. Both sides at last came into the open, the enemy 
standing about his concrete houses as our men advanced 
upon them, and using machine-guns and rifles. Most of 
these Germans were men of the 54th Reserve Division, and 



278 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

bold fellows who did not surrender so easily as I first im- 
agined, in spite of the intense and prolonged barrage that 
had swept over them and wrecked their ground. In a 
strong point at the south end of the ridge, one of those 
concrete blockhouses which shelter machine-guns, they held 
out for three hours, and it was only taken when it had 
been battered by trench-mortars brought up into action at 
close range by some gallant men of ours, and when it was 
rushed from the flanks while the ground was still being 
swept by bullets. After that the ridge was ours on its for- 
ward slopes, at the northern end dropping below the 
western slopes southwards. 

In Glencorse Wood the Lancashire men were enfiladed 
by machine-guns when a large part of the wood was no 
longer in our hands. It is on high ground, and with other 
slopes beyond, like those of Nuns' Wood and Polygon 
Wood, forms the barrier guarding the vital centres of the 
German position in the north, so that he fights to hold it 
with the full weight of his power in men and guns. Both 
are powerful, and his fire on Friday and Saturday was the 
fiercest ever faced by men who have fought through the 
Somme and later battles. 

But his counter-attacks have failed against our West- 
hoek positions, and everything I have heard shows that his 
battalions, above all the 27th Regiment, were massacred 
by our artillery. Those Germans did not all die by shell- 
fire. The Lancashire Fusiliers and the North Lancashires 
fired their rifles all through Friday and Saturday at human 
targets they coijild not fail to hit. German reserves hur- 
ried up to relieve the shattered battalions and flung straight 
into the counter-attacks, wandered about in the open, igno- 
rant of our men's whereabouts, like lost sheep. They were 
in full field kit, and as they came into the open our men 
shot at them with deadly effect. The first sign of the first' 
great counter-attack on Friday was when seventy men or so 
came forward on the left and tried to rush an old German 
gun-emplacement. They were seen by the Lancashire 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 279 

Fusiliers, and the commanding officer, believing that an at- 
tack was imminent, sent through the call for the guns 
which led to the bombardment I have described in my earlier 
message. 

We also opened a widespread barrage of machine-gun 
fire, and this caused heavy slaughter. All the country was 
aflame throughout the afternoon of Friday, and it was be- 
fore the attack, at 6.40 in the evening, that the enemy's ar- 
tillery concentrated in full and frightful fury. This ar- 
tillery-fire has never ceased since then, though slackening 
down a little from time to timiC, and to-day it was in full 
blast again. It is a day of wonderful light, so that every 
tree and house and field of standing corn is seen for miles 
from any height in a stereoscopic panorama below a fleecy 
sky with long blue reaches between the cloud mountains. 
There was a lot of air fighting this morning because of this 
light across the landscape, and wherever I motored to-day 
there was the loud drone of the flying engines, and little 
fat bursts of shrapnel trying to catch German planes who 
came over on bombing adventures above our camps and 
villages. The enemy is all out, and it seems to me likely that 
he wishes to make this battle a decisive one of the war. I 
do not see how he can hope to decide it in his own favour 
after the loss of the Pilkem and Westhoek Ridges, but he 
is out to kill regardless of his own losses. 



7 
The Battle of Langemarck 

August 16 
This morning our troops made a general advance beyond 
the line of our recent attacks and gained about 1500 yards 
of ground on a wide front, which includes the village of 
Langemarck, and goes southward in the region of Glen- 
corse Copse and Polygon Wood. From north to south the 



280 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

divisions engaged were the 29th, 20th, nth, 48th, 36th 
(Ulster), i6th (Irish), 8th, and 56th. 

On the left of our troops the French went forward also, 
and struck out into the swampy neck of ground which 
they call the Peninsula or Presqu'ile, surrounded on three 
sides by deep floods. On the right of our attack the fight- 
ing has been most violent, and the enemy has made strong 
and repeated counter-attacks over all the high ground which 
drops down to Glencorse Wood from the Nuns' Wood to 
the Hanebeek. His losses have been high, for although the 
weather is still stormy, making the ground bad for our men, 
there is light for our flying men and artillery observers, and 
at various parts of the Front his assembly of troops has 
been signalled quickly, so that our guns have smashed up 
his formations and caused great slaughter. 

The Germans used to call the battles of the Somme the 
''blood-bath." Their diaries and their letters revealed the 
horror they had of the shambles into which they were 
driven. In the early days of this year they made a strategic 
retreat, under the guidance of Hindenburg, with the one 
object of escaping from our intense artillery-fire, but their 
methods of defense have been entirely changed by holding 
the front lines lightly by weak troops and scattered ma- 
chine-gun emplacements, and concentrating their best troops 
behind for counter-attacks, in order to save man-power 
and lessen the tide of casualties. It is a sound system of 
defence, but it is the policy of an army fighting a retreat and 
giving up ground at the highest possible cost, never getting 
back by counter-attack to quite the same line over which the 
enemy had flowed. As a life-saving policy, however, the 
success has not been great, for it is certain that the German 
troops are suffering hideously from our shell-fire, and their 
counter-attacks have been costly in blood. 

I suppose these words of mine convey nothing to people 
who read them. How could they when for three years we 
have been talking in superlatives without exaggerating the 
facts, but without understanding them, as minds are numbed 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 281 

by colossal figures ? But out here, seeing the flame of shell- 
fire night after night stretching away round a great horizon, 
and hearing from near and from afar the ceaseless ham- 
mer-strokes of great guns, and watching the starlit sky, as 
I watched it last night from quiet cornfields, all red and 
restless with winking lights leaping up in tongues and 
spreading lengthwise in a sullen glare, one does realize a 
little the monstrous scale of all this and the destruction that 
is being done among the masses of men in the dark and in 
the hiding-places of the woods and trenches. 

Experts are wrangling over the numbers of the German 
reserves. Fantastic figures are given of the millions of 
Germans still imder arms. Well, there is no exact data, 
and all we know with any certainty is that the enemy is still 
outwardly strong — strong at least in defence. But the 
magnitude of his losses during three years is revealed by the 
fact of to-day's fighting and the place in which it happened. 
It was in the autumn of 1914, during the first battle of 
Ypres, that the Germans attacked our Third Brigade at 
Langemarck, where our English troops made a great and 
victorious assault to-day. Three years ago they were the 
German lads of the 19 14 class who marched up to our lines, 
linked arm in arm to be mowed down by the most deadly 
rifle-fire in the world, because those men of our old Army 
were the finest marksmen. Yesterday at Lens, or rather at 
Hill 70, there were boys of the 19 19 class who helped to 
hold the German lines, and that fact is one great tragedy 
of German hopes and the great proof of her defeat. 

Last night our English troops who were going to attack 
the village of Langemarck, the old ghost-village which has 
been wiped out of all but history, went across the Steen- 
beek stream and lay there waiting for the hour of their as- 
sault. They were all light-infantry men, the King's, the 
Duke of Cornwall's, Somerset, the "Koylies" (King's Own 
Yorkshire Light Infantry), the King's Royal Rifles, and 
the Rifle Brigade of the 20th Division. 

As we know now from captured orders a German regi- 



282 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ment was ordered to attack our lines at 3.45 this morning. 
Only forty men of that regiment were seen advancing and 
they were annihilated. Our men went forward when there 
was light enough. Immediately on their right, in front of 
them, was the ruin of an old estaminet called Au Bon Gite, 
made into a fortified emplacement and defended by ma- 
chine-guns. It was a nasty place, and our men avoided it, 
and swept both sides of it and beyond, so that its garrison 
of gunners had to surrender. Keeping a steady line as 
much as possible over bad ground, they went forward, leav- 
ing the waves that followed them to deal with batches of 
prisoners who had been left alive after our bombardment 
of the night, and made their way toward Langemarck. 
Here they were in real trouble, but not from the enemy. It 
was the state of the ground that threatened them *vith the 
worst disaster. All round Langemarck the floods were out, 
and the heavy rains of the week had filled old shell-holes to 
the brim and made a bog everywhere. Men sank up to 
their waists as in the worst days of the fighting during 
the winter on the Somme. It was not water but wet mud 
that made their cold bath, and they had to use their rifles 
to keep themselves from sinking deep, and men on little 
islands of more solid ground had to haul out their com- 
rades. All this meant loss of time, so that our barrage 
would sweep ahead of them and the German gunners would 
be able to do dirty work. 

On the left of Langemarck the men were delayed by 
these bogs. On the right they were able to push up with 
great difficulty; but still to get on and work up to the vil- 
lage. The enemy ran as soon as they saw that our men 
were near. There were some spasmodic bursts of machine- 
gun fire, but the defence was feeble, and here, anyhow, the 
enemy had been demoralized by our frightful gun-fire. 

A regimental commander, a full colonel, was taken here, 
and that is a rare bird to catch, as in most cases German of- 
ficers of that rank are well behind the line. He was de- 
jected and nerve-shaken, and spoke freely of the great losses 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS aSS 

of his men. They were men of the 79th Reserve Division 
who had been holding Langemarck, and they have suffered 
most severely, having lost large numbers of men in the pre- 
vious attacks. Other prisoners came from the 214th Divi- 
sion, holding the line north of the Staden Railway — the 
railway to the ground above Bixschoote. The regiment 
which perhaps suffered worst of all was a battalion of the 
262nd, which was broken to pieces in the British attack 
across the Steenbeek. 

To the right of the attack on Langemarck our light-in- 
fantry men were successful, and in spite of concrete block- 
houses and some deadly machine-gunning, won all the 
ground they had been asked to get. The men report that 
they saw large numbers of German dead, and that little 
groups of men fled before them as they advanced. Later 
in the morning the enemy rallied, and came back in counter- 
attacks, one of which seems to have come within ten yards 
of our men before it withered away under rifle and machine- 
gun fire. 

It was on the right centre of the attack that, as I have 
said, the fighting was most uncertain. The Irish Divisions 
were heavily engaged here working towards Polygon Wood 
and the high ground thereabouts. They had to advance over 
frightful ground, and against the enemy in his greatest 
strength, because he is determined to defend these high 
slopes if he loses all else. 

8 

Capture of Hill Seventy 

August 15 
This morning, at dawn, the Canadians captured Hill 70, 
attacked and gained a maze of streets and trenches form- 
ing the mining colonies of St.-Laurent and St.-Emilie, and 
are now fighting on the outskirts of Lens. A fair number 
of prisoners have been taken — I saw parties of them march- 



S84 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ing down under escort an hour or two ago. Some of the 
enemy's troops were seen running away from the wreck- 
age of the red houses in the suburbs of Lens as soon as 
Hill 70 was taken, but in some parts of the outer defences 
north and west of the city the garrison is fighting fiercely. 
The Canadians have, at any rate, gained most of the out- 
ward bastions of Lens formed by the separate colonies, or 
cites, as they are called, made up of blocks of miners' cot- 
tages and works united in one big mining district. 

Hill 70 is ours again after two years since we took it 
and lost it. I don't know whether that will cause a thrill to 
people at home. I think it will to those whose men fought 
there in the September of 191 5. One of m.y own great 
memories of the war is of those days in the battle of Loos, 
when the Scots of the 15th Division and the Londoners of 
the 47th, and afterwards the Guards, went through the vil- 
lage of Loos and gained that dirty ridge of ground among 
old slag-heaps under frightful shell-fire. It was gained in 
the first great rush of the Londoners and the Scots. The 
Londoners played a football up the slopes, and the Scots 
went up with their pipes — do you remember? — and for a 
few hours they had a quiet time here and collected souvenirs, 
until later the enemy came back in fierce counter-attacks, 
and the Guards and the ist Division fell back after heroic 
fighting and great losses. I saw the Jocks on that first 
day coming back with German helmets on their heads, 
laughing in spite of their wounds, and for the first time 
I saw masses^of German prisoners taken by British troops, 
and in the square of Bethune, through which, in driving 
rain, there went a steady tide of men and artillery, there 
was a group of German guns as trophies of victory. It 
seemed a great victory at first. It was only afterwards we 
knew how much more might have been gained. And there 
was a tragic story to tell. Some of the Jocks went as far 
as an outlying northern suburb of Lens, but few of them 
ever came back again. Now to-day, after two years less 
a month, the Canadians have fought over the same ground, 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 285 

and have gone over and beyond Hill 70 and linked up many 
of their former gains in these mining cites on the outskirts 
of Lens. 

In describing former fighting round Lens I said it was 
like a war in Wigan. The comparison is true. But to-day, 
when I watched the scene of the Canadian attack with 
heavy shell-fire over all these houses and pit-heads, I thought 
of another northern town which would look very much like 
this if the hell of war came to it, I thought of Bolton and 
its suburbs, Entwistle and other straggling little towns on 
the edge of the moors, with Doffcocker and rural villages 
among cornfields, and factory chimneys on the horizon, and 
slag-heaps beyond green fields. That will give an image 
to English people of the scene of war to-day, except that 
Lens and its suburbs were never so black as our English 
factory towns, and its walls are still red in spite of their 
shell-holes. 

Before the attack began at dawn wild flights of shells 
passed over this little world of ruin to Hill 70, which is no 
hill at all, but just a low hummock of ground criss-crossed 
with trenches and burrowed with dug-outs and barren and 
filthy with relics of death, on the northern side of the city 
of Lens. From all the ruins around, separate villages of 
ruin joining up with the streets of Lens itself, red flames 
gushed up when our batteries fired at a hot pace, and where 
the shells burst there were long low flashes spreading across 
a sky heavy and black with stormclouds. Over the German 
lines and the houses where they held the cellars the shells 
burst in a tumult which had a sudden beginning just before 
the dawn, and above all their smoke and fire there were 
fountains of wonderfully bright light, of burning gold and 
of running flame all scarlet and alive. The light was from 
our smoke-producing rockets, and the nmnihg flame was 
from drums of boiling oil which we fired into the enemy's 
trenches to bum him alive if we caught him there. I saw 
the far spread of gun-fire in the early morning after the 



286 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

thin crescent moon had faded, and when there was a grey, 
moist hght over the city and fields. 

Soon after the Canadians had taken Hill 70 the enemy 
flung back a great barrage, so that the ridge was vomiting 
up columns of black smoke like scores of factory chim- 
neys on a foggy day. And in all the suburbs of Lens, those 
cites of St.-Laurent and St.-Emilie and St.-Pir rre, and into 
Lievin and Calonne, and Maroc and Grenay, he pitched 
heavy shells which came howling across the wilderness of 
bricks and slag-heaps, and broke into gruff enormous coughs 
out of which black demons of smoke rose like the evil genii 
out of the bottle, darkening the view. An hour or so later 
the sun came brightly through the clouds, and these cites of 
strife, girdled by cornfields in which the stooks are standing, 
and by green hills across which the tide of slaughter has 
swept, leaving them in peace again, were flooded with fresh, 
glinting light, so that the scene was rich in colour. There 
was not a figure to be seen on Hill 70, not a movement of 
life among the houses around Lens. The Canadians had 
gone across in the smoke, and now they were hidden among 
the ruins. The only life was that of shell-fire, and it has 
a life of its own, though it is meant for death. 

A little to the left in front of me was one of the fosses 
which rise among the broken houses. For some reason the 
enemy had special spite against it, and every few minutes a 
great shell came with a yell and smashed about it. The 
German gunners were flinging their stuff about in a random 
way, searching for our batteries and hoping to kill collec- 
tions of men. They did not have much luck, and they all 
but caught sixty of their own men who had just come along 
as prisoners, and, having escaped from the barrage-fire, 
hoped for safety from their own guns. One of their shells 
fell within twenty yards of them, but before the next one 
came their guards told them to quick march, and they ran 
hard. They were wretched-looking men, more miserable in 
physique than any I have seen for a long time, and sallow 
and pinched and gaunt. Some of them were very young, 




287 

« described 
with them 

)igger than 
igsters into 

J dead who 
n feel sick, 
nen of the 
rom whom 
dng a very 
n, and the 
s that Hill 
Mdiers, the 
I inner de- 

ing the as- 
md it had 
it a worse 
could just 
■ was clean 
placements 
V^e jumped 
many Ger- 
thers were 
wonderful, 
idence. "I 
who came 
all my pals 

ing for his 
age, in one 
ig shells at 
id, "it was 



vrith a piece 
► in a piece 



LEIVS, VIMY RIDGE 

A N O 

ARRAS 

Scale 2 Miles to I Inch 

Approximate Battle Fronts 
June 1916 
Dec 1917 




S, AUGUST ISTH, IpI7 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 287 

but not all, and there were none so young as those described 
to me by some Canadian soldiers who fought with them 
to-day. 

"They were children," said one man, "no bigger than 
school-boys. I call it cruel to send such youngsters into 
the fighting-line." 

Another man told me that he saw boys lying dead who 
looked no older than fourteen, and it made him feel sick. 
They could not all have been like that, these men of the 
155th and 156th Reserve Regiments, regiments from whom 
some of the prisoners come, because they are making a very- 
stiff fight in some parts of their defensive system, and the 
Canadians have real men against them. It seems that Hill 
70 was held lightly and by the younger class of soldiers, the 
best Prussian troops being kept back to hold the inner de- 
fences of Lens, and to make counter-attacks. 

"It was a walk-over," said a Canadian, describing the as- 
sault on the hill. "Our barrage was great, and it had 
simply smashed the ground to pulp. I thought it a worse 
wreck than Vimy, which was some wreck. One could just 
see a faint suggestion of trenches, but everything was clean 
swept. There were two or three machine-gun emplacements 
which gave us a bit of trouble, but not much. We jumped 
on them and wiped them out. I can't say I saw many Ger- 
man dead, but just a few boys. I expect the others were 
buried and smashed up." These Canadians were wonderful. 
They went into the battle with an absolute confidence. "I 
knew we should do the trick," said one of them, who came 
walking back with a wound in his thigh, "and all my pals 
were of the same mind." 

He said one amazing thing, lying there waiting for his 
operation in the back parlour of a miner's cottage, in one 
of these mazes into which the enemy was plugging shells at 
times: "I enjoyed the show very much," he said, "it was 
a fair treat." 

Next to him lay another badly wounded man with a piece 
of wire plucked from his own flesh wrapped up in a piece 



288 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

of cotton-wool as a trophy, and a hole through his leg. He 
grinned at me and said: "We put it across them all right. I 
wouldn't have missed it, but I'm sorry I got this leg messed 
up. I didn't come over to get a Blighty wound. I want to 
see the end of this war. That's what I want to do. I want 
to be in at the end." 

The wounded men came back like that unless they came 
back with only the soles of their boots showing over the 
edge of the ambulance. Fortunately, up to midday at least, 
there were not many badly wounded men. The spirit of 
men who have fought and fought and seen the worst hor- 
rors of war, and suffered its most hideous discomforts, is 
one of those miracles which I do not understand. I only 
record the fact about these hardy Canadians and the Cana- 
dian Scottish. 

Of the same character are the civilian inhabitants of one 
of these mining cites on the edge of the battlefields, where 
they have remained since the beginning of the war. Nearer 
even than the edge. They live in streets where most of 
the houses have been hit and many of them wrecked. Death 
comes about and above them. Many of the people have 
been killed, and the children go to school in cellars with 
gas-masks because of the poison that comes on an east 
wind or a north. They were there again to-day: old 
women drinking early morning coffee in little rooms that 
have stood between masses of ruin; a widow in black 
weeds, like a dowager duchess, walking slowly down a 
street shelled last night and to-day ; girls with braided hair 
standing at street corners, among soldiers in steel helmets, 
watching shells bursting a little way off, with no certainty 
that that is their limit. 

One of these girls came along, and I saw that she had a 
bandaged head. 

"Wounded?" I asked. She nodded and said, "Yes, a day 
or two ago." 

"Why do you stay in such a place?" I said. "Aren't 
you frightened?" 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 289 

She laughed. "What can one do? My mamma keeps 
living here, so how can I go away ? Besides, one gets used 
to it a little." 

I am bound to say I don't get used to these things, but see 
them always with amazement. 

A Few Days Later 
Lens itself is now no better than its outer suburbs, a town 
of battered houses without roofs and with broken walls 
leaning against rubbish-heaps of brickwork and timber. The 
enemy sent out a wireless message that the English gunners 
were destroying French property by bombarding the city, 
and then made a deep belt of destruction by blowing up long 
blocks of streets. After that our guns have completed the 
ruin, for there was a German garrison in every house, and 
in this kind of warfare there must be no tenderness of senti- 
ment about bricks and mortar if the enemy is between the 
walls. So now in Lens the only cover for Germans and 
their only chance of safety is below ground in the tunnels 
and cellars reinforced by concrete and built by the forced 
labor of civilians two years and more ago when the city 
was menaced by a French attack. Into these tunnels the 
German garrisons of Lens make their way by night, and in 
them they live and die. Many die in them it is certain, for 
a tunnel is no more than a death-trap when it is blocked at 
the entrance by the fall of houses, or when it collapses by 
the bombardment of heavy shells which pierce down deep 
and explode with monstrous effect. That has happened, as 
we know, in many parts of the German line, and recently on 
the French front whole companies of German soldiers were 
buried alive in deep caves. It is happening in Lens now, 
if the same effect is produced by the same power of artillery. 
But death comes to the German soldiers there in another 
way, without any noise and quite invisible, and very hor- 
rible in its quietude. Many times lately the Canadians have 
drenched the city of Lens with gas that kills, and soaks 
down heavily into dug-outs and tunnels, and stifles men in 



290 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

their sleep before they have time to stretch out a hand for 
a gas-mask, or makes them die with their masks on if they 
fumble a second too long. The enemy, who was first to use 
poison-gas, should wish to God he had never betrayed his 
soul by such a thing, for it has come back upon him as a 
frightful retribution, and in Lens, in those deep, dark cel- 
lars below the ruins, German soldiers must live with terror 
and be afraid to sleep. 

Yesterday, when I went to that neighbourhood, I saw 
four German soldiers who had come out into the open, 
rather risking death there than by staying in their dungeon. 
They appeared for a minute round the corner of some 
brick-stacks in the Cite St.-Auguste. I was watching the 
German lines there, and staring at the ruined houses and 
slag-heaps and broken watertowers of Harnes and Annay, 
beyond the outer fields of the mining city. The church 
towers in both those villages still stand, though a little dam- 
aged, and some of the red roofs are still intact. The Ger- 
man lines were away beyond a strip of No Man's Land, and 
here not a soul was to be seen, no trace of life in all this land 
of death until suddenly I saw those four figures come 
stealthily up behind the brick-stacks. They stood up quite 
straight and looked towards our ground, and then after a 
second crouched low so that only their heads showed above 
a little dip in the ground. A few minutes later I saw two 
more Germans. They ran at a jog-trot along a hedge out- 
side the Cite St.-Auguste and made a bolt through a gap. 
It was as strange to see them as though they were visitors 
from another planet, for, in this district of Lens, no man 
shows his body above ground unless he is careless of a quick 
death, and one may stare for days at the empty houses and 
the broken mine-shafts and the high black slag-heaps with- 
out seeing any living thing. 

On our side of the lines, during a long walk yesterday to 
the crest of Hill 70, I saw only a few lonely figures above 
ground, although below ground there were many, and in 
one dug-out where I was lucky to go I found a luncheon- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 291 

party of officers discussing the psychology of Kerensky 
and news of the world one day old, and the chances of 
three years more of war or thirty, as men do round a Lon- 
don dinner-table, though there were loud, unpleasant noises 
overhead, where German shells were in flight to a trench 
which had been recommended to me as a nice safe place for 
a Sunday walk. Somehow, I did not believe in the safety 
of any walk in this neighbourhood, because there were fresh 
shell-holes along the tracks between the ruined houses which 
could not inspire the simplest soul with confidence. There 
is not a house there which has not been knocked edgewise 
or upside down, and the little village church I passed is 
no longer a place for worship but a nightmare building, in- 
habited by the menace of death. The German gunners can- 
not leave these mining villages alone, though they are as de- 
serted as the Polar regions, with no cheerful Tommy's face 
to be seen through any of the empty window-frames, or 
through any of the holed walls or doAvn any of the sand- 
bag shelters which used to be the homes of British soldiers 
when the fighting was closer this way. 

It is the loneliness which one hates most in these places, 
especially when shells come along with a beastly noise which 
seems a particular menace to one's own body as there is no- 
body else to be killed. So I was glad to fall in with a 
young officer who was working his way up the line. He 
had just brought down a wounded man, and was stopping 
a while in a wayside dressing-station, where there was a 
friendly and lonely doctor, who offered the hospitality of 
his sand-bags and steel girders to any passer-by, and said 
''Stay a bit longer" when bits of shell could be heard whin- 
ing outside. We went along the way together, close to the 
grim old muck-heap, the Double Grassier, where Germans 
and English lived cheek by jowl for two years until recent 
weeks, fighting each other with bombs when they were 
bored with each other's company, and so past the village 
of Loos. 

The way up to Hill 70 is historic ground, and every 



292 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

bit of brickwork, every stump of a tree, every yard or so 
of road, is haunted by the memory of gallant men, who in 
September just two years ago came this way under fright- 
ful shell-fire and fell here in great numbers. Among them 
were the Londoners of the glorious 47th Division and the 
Scots of the 15th — as I walked by the village of Loos I 
thought of some friends of mine in the Gordons who had 
great adventures there that day amongst those dreadful 
little ruins — and Hill 70 was taken and lost again after 
heroic fighting and tragic episodes, which are still remem- 
bered with a shudder by men who hate to think of them. 

It is only a few weeks ago that we took the ground be- 
yond in that great Canadian assault upon Hill 70 which I 
described at the time, and up there on the hill-side — it is not 
much of a hill, but goes up very gradually to the crest — 
the trenches are still littered with German relics, and in the 
deep dug-outs burnt out and blown out there are still Ger- 
man bodies lying. The smell of death comes out of these 
holes, and it is not a pleasant place. 

Before the Canadian assault English troops of the glori- 
ous old 6th Division captured and held the approaches 
and raided the Germans in Nash Alley, which is a famous 
trench in the history of the Durhams and the Essex Regi- 
ment and of the Buffs and West Yorkshires, and resisted 
ferocious German attacks with the most grim courage. 
Under their pressure the Germans yielded part of their line 
one night, withdrawing to another line of trenches secretly, 
but these troops of ours followed them up so quickly that 
they were in the German dug-outs before the candles had 
gone out. The Canadian capture of Hill 70 was a great 
blow to the German command, and they tried vainly to get 
it back by repeated counter-attacks. They will never get it 
back now, and Lens, which lies below it, remains for them 
a death-trap, which only pride makes them hold, and where 
in the cellars men are forced to live hellishly under our 
shells and gas in order to uphold that pride in men who do 
not take the risks nor suffer the agony of this hidden death. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 293 

9 

Londoners in Glencorse Wood 

August 17 
The battle of Langemarck yesterday, and all the struggle 
southward to the ground about Glencorse Wood and In- 
verness Copse was one of the most heroic as well as one of 
the bloodiest days of fighting in all this war. The enemy 
put up a fierce resistance except at points where underfed 
boys had been thrust out in shell-holes, as in the neighbour- 
hood of Langemarck. to check the first onslaught of our men 
if possible, and if not to die. Behind them, as storm troops 
for counter-attack, were some of the finest troops of the 
German army. Among them was the 54th Division, which 
had already been severely mauled by our gun-fire and was 
utterly exhausted. But other divisions, like the 34th, who 
were in front of our Londoners, were fresh and strong, 
only just brought into the battle-line. Behind the imme- 
diate supporting troops were massed reserves whom the 
German command held ready to hurry up in wagons and 
light railways to any part of the field where their lines 
were most threatened, or when instant counter-attacks might 
inflict most damage on our men. 

In gun-power the enemy was and is strong. He had pre- 
pared a large concentration of guns south-east of our right 
flank, and whatever may be his reserves of ammunition he 
has gathered up great stores for this present battle. On the 
right of our attack he stood on high ground, the crest of 
Polygon Wood, and the slopes down from Abraham 
Heights and the Gravenstafel Ridge. It is the big door 
which he must slam in our face at all costs, because it opens 
out to his plains beyond; and against it he has massed all 
his weight. Our men, it will be seen, were not likely to 
have a walk-over. They did not, but took all they gained 
by hard fighting. It could in no sense of the word be a 



294 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

walk-over. The ground was hideous, worse than in the 
winter on the Somme. That seems strange, with a hot sun 
shining overhead and dust rising in clouds along traffic 
roads behind the battle-line as I saw it to-day. That is the 
irony of things. Where our men were fighting yesterday 
and to-day there are hundreds of thousands of shell-holes, 
some three feet deep and some ten feet deep, and each shell- 
hole is at least half full of water, and many of them are 
joined so that they form lakes deep enough to drown men 
and horses if they fall in. So it was, and is, around the 
place where Langemarck village stood, and where the old 
lake of the chateau that no longer stands has flooded over 
into a swamp, and where a double row of black tree-stumps 
goes along the track of the broken road where the people 
of Langemarck used to walk to church before the devil 
did in. so many old churches and established little hells of 
his own on their rubbish-heaps. So it was yesterday and 
remains to-day all about, the stumps of trees sticking up 
out of a mush of slimy, pitted ground which go by the 
romantic names of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, 
and Shrewsbury Forest and Polygon Wood. The photo- 
graphs of our airmen taken yesterday in low flights over 
these damned places reveal the full foulness of them. Seen 
from this high view, they are long stretches of white barren 
earth pockmarked by innumerable craters, where no man or 
human body is to be seen, though there are many dead and 
some living lying in those holes, and they are all bright and 
shining, because the sun is glinting on the water which 
fills them, except where dense clouds of smoke from great 
gun-fire drift across. 

The courage of men who attacked over such ground was 
great courage. The grim, stubborn way in which our 
soldiers made their way through these bogs and would 
not be beaten, though they slipped and fell and stuck deep 
while the enemy played machine-gun bullets on to their 
lines and flimg high explosives over the whole stretch of 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 295 

bogland through which they had to pass, is one of the 
splendid and tragic things in our poor human story, 

I told yesterday how some of our English battalions took 
Langemarck like this, leaving many comrades bogged, 
wounded, and spent, but crawling round the concrete houses, 
over the old cellars of the village and routing out the Ger- 
mans who held them with machine-guns. At the block- 
house on the way up, called Au Bon Gite, an oblong fort 
of concrete walls ten feet thick, the Germans bolted in- 
side as soon as they saw our men, slammed down an iron 
door, and for a time stayed there while our bombers prowled 
round like hungry wolves waiting for their prey. Later 
they gave themselves up because our line swept past them 
and they had no hope. 

In another place of the same kind, called Reitre Farm, 
from which came a steady blast of machine-gun fire, our 
men made several desperate rushes and at last, when many 
lay wounded, a machine-gunner of ours got close and thrust 
the barrel of his weapon through a slit in the wall and 
swept the inner chamber with a flood of bullets. 

There were savage fights in some of the dark cellars of 
Langemarck between men who would not surrender and 
men who would not turn back, and men who fell heavily 
against other men and knew that in these underground holes 
it must be their life or the other's, and the quicker the bet- 
ter. They fought their way beyond Langemarck yesterday, 
and on the left of our advance we hold to-day all the 
ground that was taken, which follows the curve of the 
Langemarck — Gheluvelt line, dug and wired by months of 
labour according to the orders of the German command, 
afraid of our coming menace, and now blotted out. The 
fighting all about this ground was by groups of English 
soldiers, in some cases without officers, and in some cases 
led by privates with a sense of leadership and fine, stern 
courage. They were Royal Fusiliers, Lancashire Fusiliers, 
Middlesex, Guernseys, and other battalions of the 29th Di- 
vision, the Light Infantry battalions of the 20th Divi- 



296 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

sion, the Yorkshires, Lancashires, South Staffords, Lin- 
colns, and Borderers of the nth Division, and the Ox- 
fords, Gloucesters, and Berkshires of the 48th Division. So 
things happened on the left of the battle. All ground was 
gained as it had been planned, and all held, and many hun- 
dreds of prisoners were taken, though that is not the best 
proof of success. 

On the right it was different. It was on the right that 
the enemy fought hardest, counter-attacked most fiercely and 
most often, and concentrated the heaviest artillery. There 
were the Irish Brigades here, and English county troops of 
the 8th Division, and London battalions of the 56th. All 
this side of the attack became involved at once in desperate 
fighting. The ground was damnable — cratered and full 
of water and kneedeep in foul mud — and beyond them was 
high ground, struck through with gully-like funnels, through 
which the enemy could pour up his storm troops for counter- 
attack; and away in the mud were the same style of con- 
crete forts as up north, still unbroken by our bombardments 
and fortified again with new garrisons of machine-gunners, 
taking the place of those who on July 31 were killed or 
captured when this ground was stormed and, later, lost. 

The English and the Irish battalions made progress in 
spite of heavy fire on them and no light losses; but in the 
afternoon of yesterday they had to withdraw from their 
advanced positions under the pressure of fierce counter- 
attacks by fresh troops. They fought these rear-guard ac- 
tions stubbornly. Irish as well as English fought some- 
times in small groups in isolated posts, until they were 
killed or captured. They made the enemy pay a big price 
in blood for his old ground, but their own casualties could 
not be light in view of the desperate character of this 
struggle. 

As yet I know very few details of the Irish side of things. 
I know more about the Londoners, for I have been to see 
them to-day, and they have told me the facts of yesterday. 
They are tragic facts, because for English troops it is al- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 297 

ways a tragedy to withdraw from any yard of soil they have 
taken by hard fighting, and many good London lads will 
never come back from that morass. But there is nothing 
the matter with London courage, and to me there is soi^e- 
thing more thrilling in the way these boys fought to the 
death, some of them in the bitterness of retreat, than in 
the rapid and easy progress of men in successful attack. Ly- 
ing out all night in the wet mud under heavy fire, they at- 
tacked at dawn up by Glencorse Wood, in the direction of 
Polygon Wood. On the right, they and their neighbours 
at once came under blasts of fire from five machine-guns in 
a strong point, and under a hostile barrage-fire that was 
frightful in its intensity. They could not make much 
headway. No mortal men could have advanced under such 
fire, and so their comrades on the left were terribly ex- 
posed to the scythe of bullets which swept them also. 

Men of London regiments — the Queen's Westminsters 
and the old "Vies" and the Rangers and the Kensingtons^ — 
fought forward with a wonderful spirit which is a white 
shining light in all this darkness — through Glencorse Wood 
and round to the north of Nuns' Wood, avoiding the most 
deeply flooded ground here, where there was one big boggy 
lake. Parties of the Middlesex went into Polygon Wood, 
which is a long way forward, and actually brought prisoners 
out of that place. At a strong point near the Hooge — 
Gheluvelt road they killed thirty-four Germans and cap- 
tured the redoubt. But there were Germans still left in 
other concrete houses near by, and they were very strong at 
the Zonnebeke position on the north-west. 

Very soon counter-attacks developed from the south 
out of Inverness Copse, and from the north. The London- 
ers were exhausted after their dreadful night and all this 
fighting over foul ground ; they were in exposed positions, 
and they were shut in by the most terrible gun-fire. What 
happened with the Irish and other troops happened here. 
Our airmen, flying low, saw small isolated groups of Lon- 
don boys fighting separate battles against great odds. The 



298 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

enemy was encircling them, and they were trying to hold 
rear-guard positions, so that their comrades could with- 
draw in good order. A signalled message that found its 
Wixy to headquarters tells one such story. I read to-day 
the little pink slip bearing the words as they came in. They 
are from a Middlesex officer. "Am in shell-hole before 
second objective, and two strong points held t^ the enemy. 
Have ten men with me. We are surrounded, and heavy 
machine-gun fire is being turned on us. Regret no course 
but to surrender. Can't see any of our forces." 

That message was the only one of its kind received, but 
there were many small groups of London men, led by young 
officers, or without officers, who held on to the last like that, 
and did not let down the pride of their great city, so gay, so 
ignorant yesterday afternoon, with a tide of traffic swirling 
down its streets, while out here on the wet barren earth, 
under the same sun, these boys of London fought and died, 
or in small groups rose from among their dead and wounded 
and went white-faced into the circle of the enemy who had 
surrounded them. 

lO 

Somersets at Langemarck 

August 19 
The enemy, after denying our taking of Langem.arck, now 
admit their loss of it. Our prisoners who were brought 
through the place had the German wireless read out to them 
and were abashed by the untruth of the message. It was a 
German sergeant-major who put up the only excuse. He 
laughed and said : "In this war it is only those who win who 
can afford to tell the official truth. A reverse is always 
covered by a lie." 

We are well beyond Langemarck, and to-day I went 
among the men who got there first — the 20th Division — 
fighting their way past machine-gun blockhouses, which is 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 299 

the new system of German defence, past the deadly ma- 
chine-gun fire that came out of them, and through to the 
village and its surrounding swamps. These young officers, 
who have lost many of their comrades, and these men of 
theirs belonging to light-infantry battalions, were sleep- 
ing and resting in their tents behind the fighting-lines, and 
cleaning themselves up after days in wet mud and the filth 
of the battlefield. But they were keen to tell the tale of 
their adventures, and if I could put them down just as they 
were told, one man adding to another man's story, the ex- 
citement of remembrance rousing them from their weari- 
ness, and queer grim laughter breaking out when they spoke 
of their greatest dangers, it would be a strange narrative. 
They were men who had escaped death by prodigious 
chance, and officers and men greeted each other joyfully and 
with a splendid spirit of comradeship as brothers-in-arms 
who were glad to see each other alive and remembered how 
they had stuck it together in the worst hours. They belonged 
to the Somerset Light Infantry of the 20th Division, and 
they came from old towns like Bridgwater and Crewkerne 
and Yeovil, which seem a million miles away from such 
scenes of war. One young officer of the Somerset knew 
most of what had happened, and his own adventures that 
day would fill a book if told in detail. He took me into 
his tent and showed me how his kit had been pierced by 
bullets and torn by the blast of shell-fire, and he marvelled 
that he had no more than a hurt hand cut against the teeth 
of a German sniper and a body bruised all over, but with 
a whole skin. "A bit of luck," he said. This young man 
must have been born under a lucky star, for the things 
he went through that day would have frightened a cat rely- 
ing on nine lives and taking a hundred chances on the score 
of them. 

On the way up to Langemarck to the left of that solid 
blockhouse called Au Bon Gite, where the enemy held out 
behind iron doors while our troops went past them swept 
by machine-gun fire, there were many German snipers lying 



SOO FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

about in shell-holes. They were very brave men, put out 
into these holes to check our advance, and knowing that 
they were bound to die, because that is the almost certain 
fate of snipers on such ground. They lay doggo, pretend- 
ing to be corpses when any of our men were near enough 
to see, but using their rifles with deadly aim when they 
had any elbow-room. I heard that one man killed four of 
our officers, and another killed fourteen men and wounded 
eleven before he was shot through the head. One of these 
men well behind our advancing waves lay very still, close to 
the young officer of the Somersets of whom I spoke, and 
who saw the fellow move and raise his rifle. He pounced 
on him and struck him across the face with his bare fist 
and tore his hand open against the man's teeth. They were 
bad teeth, and the hand is now festering. Another sniper 
gave himself away, and the young officer shot him through 
the head with a revolver, which was very busy all that day. I 
have already told how these light-infantry men had to 
struggle through bogs around Langemarck, how they fell 
into shell-holes full of water, and how, under great fire, 
they made their way into the place where Langemarck vil- 
lage had once been and attacked the dug-outs and block- 
houses there. Some of the strangest episodes happened 
between the village and a point called the Streiboom. There 
were two more blockhouses on the Langemarck road girdled 
by machine-gun fire. The first one was rushed by twenty 
men, led by this young officer I have been telling about, and 
bombed until thirty Germans tumbled out and surrendered. 
But beyond was the other blockhouse, and upon this the of- 
ficer of the Somersets advanced with only six men. A ma- 
chine-gun was firing from the right of it, and it was a strong 
place of concrete with no open door. The seven Somersets 
went straight for it, and the officer flung two bombs through 
the loopholes, but they did not seem to take effect. Then 
he hurled two more bombs, which were his last, at the iron 
door, but they did not burst. With his bare fists he beat at 
the door and shouted out, "Come out, you blighters, come 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 301 

out." Presently, to his surprise, they came out, not two or 
three, nor six or seven, but forty-two stout and hefty men. 
Among them was an English soldier badly wounded, who 
had been taken prisoner three days before. He was a 
Yorkshireman, who had lain among the enemy, well treated, 
but dying. The Germans could not send him behind their 
lines because of our bombardment, which had cut off their 
supplies, so that they were four days hungry when they 
surrendered. In another dug-out was another Yorkshire- 
man, and he is now safe and well behind our own lines. 

There were eight machine-guns in that last blockhouse, 
one of which I saw to-day, and two of them, fitted up with 
new springs, were used against the enemy. One of them 
was worked on a hydraulic lift, so that it could be got into 
action very quickly from its underground place. In the 
blockhouse from which the forty-two had been taken by 
this small body of Somersets was a great store of 5-9 shells. 
All told this little group of men took 100 prisoners that 
day, and their officer himself is said to have killed sixteen 
Germans and to have wounded many more. After the 
blockhouse affair he chased a number of the enemy running 
down the Langemarck road, and, using his revolver in the 
cowboy fashion, dropping his wrist from the shoulder, he 
plugged them as he ran. After that he went on and held 
an exposed advanced post with a mixed lot of Somersets 
and "Koylies" (King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry) 
and Rifle Brigade men. They had next to no ammunition, 
but they held on all night, hoping for the best, but not 
sure of it. And this young officer who was their leader 
told me to-day that — great God! — he "enjoyed" himself 
and was "fearfully bucked" with his day's work. The ex- 
citement of it all was in his eyes, as he told me, in much 
more detail than I have given, the story of the thirty-six 
hours. 

It is indeed an astounding chapter of courage all this at- 
tack on Langemarck by men who before the attack had been 
bombarded with gas and other shells, and who then floun- 



302 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

dered in deep bogs, where they got stuck up to the waist, but 
worked in small parties up and on, fighting all the way 
against an enemy who put up a gallant and stubborn re- 
sistance and sold every hundred yards of ground as dearly 
as he could. The runners who went back again and again 
through that slough of despond under damnable fire were 
real heroes. The stretcher-bearers who carried down the 
wounded all that day and night regardless of their own 
lives were beyond words splendid, and the carriers who 
brought up rations so that the men in front should have 
enough to eat and drink were as brave as those who fought. 
In the midst of all this turmoil, all this death, all this mud 
and blood, men kept their sense of humour and their 
shrewd wit in a way which beats me. "Do you speak 
English?" said a sergeant-major to a German non-com- 
missioned officer who came out of a dug-out full of men. 
"Nein, nein," said the man. "Well, you've got to learn 
bally quick," said the sergeant-major, "so go and tell those 
pals of yours to come out before something happens to 
them." And the German learnt enough English in the 
sergeant-major's eyes to deliver the command correctly 
enough. 

I have spoken only of the Somersets. Other light In- 
fantry — the Durhams and the "Koylies" and the D.C.L.I.— 
who worked with them and who took Reitres Farm and 
other strong points, were not less dogged, and this day at 
Langemarck was a glorious revelation of the old spirit of 
the West Country, which is still strong and fine. 

And now I must write again about the Canadians, whose 
attack towards Lens I watched the other day among our 
guns. 

That story is not yet finished, and has been going on ever 
since that morning when the Canadians took Hill 70 and the 
cites of St.-Emilie and St.-Laurent, working forward 
towards the heart of Lens. It is clear that the enemy's 
command issued orders for Hill 70 and the other ground 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 303 

to be retaken at all costs. There have been no fewer than 
thirteen counter-attacks against the Canadian troops, and 
men of the 4th Guards Division, and later of the 220th Regi- 
ment, have come forward in wave after wave and hurled 
themselves with desperate courage against the Canadian 
defence. 

Time after time they have been seen assembling by our 
flying men and observers, and time after time their ranks 
have been shattered by our guns. To the north of Lens 
there is a chalk quarry, which was not gained by the Cana- 
dians in their first attack, so that they established their 
line on the west side of it, and it was against this line that 
repeated efforts were made. Each attempt was smashed up, 
and then the Canadians advanced into the quarry and cap- 
tured ninety men of many units and tv/enty machine-guns. 
The prisoners complain that their officers had lost their 
heads, and had been utterly demoralized. After violent at- 
tacks on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, the enemy 
made a great effort with every weapon of frightfulness on 
Friday evening, using poison-gas and flame-jets and a 
hurricane of high explosives in order to drive the Canadians 
off Hill 70. It failed with great losses to themselves when 
the German infantry attacked, and the attacks yesterday 
have had no greater success. The Canadians claim that 
the enemy's losses must be at least three times as great as 
their own. There were moments when the Canadians were 
hard pressed, and one of them was when a battalion com- 
mander was warned that the Germans were behind him. 
"I'm all right," he said cheerily, and then suddenly he said, 
"Good Lord, so they are." He was not heard from again 
for two hours and a half, and in that time he had organized 
his clerks and batmen and signallers and driven out a party 
of Germans who had worked out round No Man's Land and 
thrust a wedge behind him. The fighting has been savage 
and fierce, and the Canadians have used the bayonet at 
close quarters and fought hand to hand in the dark cellars 



304< FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

of the mining cites. This phase of the war is as bloody as 
anything that has been done in the history of human strife. 



II 

The Irish in the Swamps 

August 21 
It is of the Irish now that I will write, though their story 
is four days old and not a tale of great victory. It is easier 
to write of success than of failure, and of great advances 
than of grim rear-guard actions fought by men desperately 
tried but still heroic. But I want to tell the story of the 
Irish who went forward over bad ground on the morning 
of August 16, that morning when there was great success 
at Langemarck on the left, and something less than suc- 
cess on the right. 

These Irishmen had no luck at all. They gained ground 
but lost it again. It is up to the Irish to tell this tale, for 
they were grand men and they fought and fell with simple 
valour. They were the Southern Irish and the men of 
Ulster side by side again, as they were at Wytschaete, where 
I met them on the morning of the battle and afterwards, 
glad because they had taken a great share in one of the 
finest victories of the war. Their laughter rang out then 
as they told me their adventures, all their young officers 
keen to say hQW splendid their men had been, and the men 
themselves drawing cheerful comparisons between this 
day's luck and that other day at Ginchy, on the Somme, 
when they gained another victory, but with thinned ranks, 
so that when I met them marching out they had but the 
remnants of battalions, and their general called out words 
of good cheer to them with a break in his voice. After 
Wytschaete they were in high spirits. Quick in attack, full 
of the old Irish dash, they were the men for a sudden as- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 305 

sault, needing an impetuous advance, while they were fresh 
and unspoilt. But they had no luck this time. 

Let me tell first the happenings of the Irish troops on the 
right, the Catholic Irish, whose own right was on the 
Roulers railway, going up to the Potsdam Redoubt. An 
hour or so before the attack the enemy, as though knowing 
what was about to come, flung down a tremendous and 
destructive barrage, . answered by our own drum-fire, which 
gave the signal for the Irish to advance. The Dublin 
Fusiliers and the Royal Irish Rifles went forward on the 
right and the Inniskillings on the left. In front of them 
were numbers of German strong points, the now famous 
pill-boxes, or concrete blockhouses, which the enemy has 
built as his new means of defence to take the place of 
trench systems. They were Beck House, Borry Farm, and 
the Bremen Redoubt — sinister names which will never be 
forgotten in Irish history. There were also odd bits of 
trench here and there for the use of snipers and small 
advanced posts. As the first wave of the Irish assaulting 
troops advanced Germans rose from those ditches and ran 
back to the shelter of the concrete works, and immediately 
from those emplacements and from other machine-gun posi- 
tions echeloned in depth behind them swept a fierce enfilade 
fire of machine-gun bullets, even through the barrage of our 
shell-fire, which went ahead of the Irish line. Many men 
in the first wave dropped, but the others kept going, and 
reached almost as far as they had been asked to go. The 
Royal Irish Rifles worked up the Roulers railway to the 
level crossing, and captured two German officers and thirty 
prisoners. The Dublin Fusiliers, on their left, were held 
up by machine-guns from the Bremen Redoubt, and later 
a message came down from that small party. It was from 
a young Irish subaltern. "I am lying out here in a shell- 
hole. All officers and men killed or wounded." Other men 
joined him, but were cut off and taken prisoners. On the 
left the Inniskillings, who had crossed over the Zonnebeke 
river, made good and rapid progress, capturing two strong 



806 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

redoubts and seizing an important little hill — Hill 37 — 
which was one of the keys of the position. The success of 
the day would have been gained if the centre had been 
carried, and if the supporting troops could have come 
up. But neither of these things happened. The supporting 
waves were caught by the cross-fire of machine-guns, and 
they could make hardly any headway. The Borry Farm 
Redoubt gave most trouble. It contained five machine- 
guns and a garrison of sixty expert and determined gun- 
ners, and never fell all day. It broke the centre of the 
Irish attack, and was the cause of heroic but deadly efforts 
by the Irish Rifles, followed by Inniskillings. The Royal 
Irish Fusiliers attacked it by direct assault, knowing that 
everything was staked on their success. They went for it 
like tigers, but without avail. One of the battalion officers, 
seeing this failure, but knowing how all depended upon the 
capture of that fort, thereupon led another attack by a 
company of the Royal Irish Rifles. This met the same fate. 

Meanwhile the men of the Ulster Division were fight- 
ing just as desperately. They had ahead of them several 
of the concrete forts, one of which, near Pond Farm, was 
a strong defensive system with deep dug-outs and over- 
head cover proof against shell-fire. This and other strong 
points had wooden platforms above the concrete walls, on 
which the gunners could mount their machines very quickly, 
firing them behind two yards thickness of concrete. 

Opposite the Pommern Redoubt stands a small hill which 
the enemy has used for a long time as one of his chief 
observation-posts, as it gives a complete view of our ground. 
Beyond that the country rises to a saddle-back ridge, with 
double spurs guarded on the lower slope by a small fort 
called Gallipoli, and from these spurs he could fling a ma- 
chine-gun barrage across the low ground. An ugly posi- 
tion to attack. It was worse for the Ulster men because of 
the state of the ground, which was a thin crust over a bog 
of mud. On the left some of the Inniskillings and Irish 
Rifles rushed forward as far as a network of trenches and 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 307 

wired defences, which they took in a fierce assault against 
a Bavarian garrison, who fought to a finish. Here they 
recaptured one of our Lewis guns lost in the fighting on 
July 31. On the right the Irish Rifles and the Fusihers, 
walking through the fire of many machine-guns, made a 
straight attack upon Hill 35, which dominated the centre 
of the Ulster attack. Before it were some gun-pits, and 
the Ulster men, by most desperate efforts, took and crossed 
these pits and fought up the slopes of the hill beyond. But 
they could not keep the hill nor the pits. So after many 
hours of frightful fighting the situation was that some scat- 
tered groups of Dublins and Royal Irish held out on a 
far goal with exposed flanks, with some Inniskillings cling- 
ing to the slopes of Hill 37, while on the other side of 
the Zonnebeke river the Ulster men had been forced off 
their little hill, and had been unable to get beyond the Ger- 
man chain of concrete houses. 

The enemy's aeroplanes came over to survey the situa- 
tion, and, taking a leaf from our book, flew very low, 
firing their machine-guns at the advanced posts of Irish 
lying in shell-holes and in the hummocky ground. They 
were in a desperate position, those advanced posts. . . . 
Then the enemy launched his counter-attack from the di- 
rection of Zonnebeke, and gradually the shattered lines 
of the Irish fell back, slowly fighting little rear-guard ac- 
tions in isolated groups. Many of them were surrounded 
and cut off, or had to fight their way back in the night or 
the dawn of next day. 

All through the worst hours an Irish padre went about 
among the dead and dying, giving absolution to his boys. 
Once he came back to headquarters, but he would not take 
a bite of food or stay, though his friends urged him. He 
went back to the field to minister to those who were glad 
to see him bending over them in their last agony. Four 
men were killed by shell-fire as he knelt beside them, and 
he was not touched — not touched until his own turn came. 
A shell burst close, and the padre fell dead. 



308 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

There were many other men who gave up their lives 
for their friends that day — stretcher-bearers, who had a 
long way to go under fire, and runners, who had to crawl 
on their stomachs from shell-hole to shell-hole, and carry- 
ing-parties and medical officers. Near the Frezenberg Re- 
doubt, which was on the right of the Catholic Irish, a doc- 
tor worked, never sleeping for days and nights, but going 
out of his dug-out to crawl after wounded men and band- 
aging up their wounds under heavy fire. The first man he 
found was not one of his Irish. Away in front of the 
line, in No Man's Land, was a bogged Tank, and Irish sen- 
tries heard a wail from it. The doctor heard of this and 
crept out to the Tank and found a Scottish soldier there 
badly wounded, as he had crept into this shelter days be- 
fore. The doctor bandaged him, and, without calling for 
help, carried him back on his own shoulders. Another 
Scot was found in a shell-hole wounded in both legs. He 
was one of the Gordons, and had been lying there since 
July 31. He is "in a good state of health," was the report 
of the Irish patrol, and will be sent home to-night. 

Before the battle and after it the Bavarians behaved de- 
cently about the wounded, and allowed the stretcher-bearers 
to work in the open without being shelled, though some of 
them were hit in the machine-gun barrage. It is good to 
know that, and fair to say it. The Bavarians against the 
Irish fought, as I am told by Irishmen, in a clean, straight 
way, and their defence was stronger than our attack. The 
Irish troops had no luck. It was a day of tragedy. But 
poor Ireland should be proud of these sons of hers, who 
struggled against such odds and fought until their strength 
was spent, and even then held on in far posts with a spirit 
scornful of the word "surrender." Some very noble young 
officers gave up their lives rather than say that word, and 
all these dear Irish boys went to the last limit of human 
endurance before they fell back. Not by any hair's-breadth 
did they lose the honour they won at Wytschaete and 
Ginchy. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 309 

12 

The Way Through Glencorse Wood 

August 22. 
There was severe fighting again to-day eastwards of St.- 
Julien (3^ miles north-east of Ypres), extending south 
across the Zonnebeke, beyond the Frezenberg Redoubt, 
while on the right our troops again penetrated Glencorse 
Copse (due east of Ypres), and fought on that ugly ris- 
ing ground which the enemy is defending in great strength. 
The Divisions engaged, from north to south, are the 29th, 
38th, nth, 48th, i8th, 6ist, 15th, 19th, 47th, 14th, and 
24th. 

On the left progress has been made from the high road 
of St.-Julien to the Zonnebeke-Langemarck road, which 
cuts across it, guarded on the enemy's side by two strong 
points with the usual concrete shelters which the Germans 
have adopted as their new means of forward defence. Be- 
low them there is another strong position called Winnipeg, 
about which our men were heavily engaged in the early 
hours of this morning, and below that again the same 
series of pill-boxes and concrete blockhouses against which 
the Irish battalions went forward with such desperate 
valour on the i6th of this month, as I described in my 
message yesterday. 

Scottish troops of the 15th Division attacked to-day 
where the Southern Irish were engaged six days ago. Be- 
fore them they had those sinister forts. Beck House and 
Borry Farm, and Vampire Point guarding the way to the 
Bremen Redoubt, which will be remembered always in the 
history of the Irish brigades as places of heroic endeavour, 
just as now this morning they will take their place in the 
annals of our Scottish fighting. To the left of them are 
other forts, round which the Ulster men were fighting last 
week — Pond Farm, Schuler Farm, and others on the way 



310 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

to the Gallipoli Redoubt. About these places Warwick- 
shires and other Midland troops of the 6ist Division have, 
been fighting, and have met with the same difficulties, 
apart from the state of the ground, which has dried a lit- 
tle. It has not dried much, for our shell-fire has broken 
up the gullies and streams with which it was drained, and 
the country is water-logged, so that the pools remain until 
the sun dries them up. The shell-holes and these ponds are 
not so full of water as when the Irish went across, and 
the surface of the shell-broken earth is hardening. But it 
is only a thin crust over a bog, so that the Tanks which 
went forward to-day here and there could not get very far 
without sinking in. One Tank was taken by a gallant crew 
almost as far as a German strong point nearly half a mile 
beyond our old front line very early in the morning, and 
did good work up there. The enemy put down a furious 
barrage-fire soon after the attack had started to-day, and 
kept the Frezenberg Redoubt under intense bombardment. 
But as soon as the attack developed he could not use his 
artillery against our men at many points, not knowing 
what forts and ground were still held by his own troops. 
He relied again upon the cross-fire of machine-guns, ar- 
ranged very skilfully in depth, for enfilade barrages, and 
upon the garrisons who held his concrete redoubts in the 
advanced positions. In one of the blockhouses this morn- 
ing our Warwickshire men captured forty-seven prisoners, 
who, when they were surrounded, took refuge in tunnelled 
galleries running to the right of the main fort, called 
Schuler Farm.- Some of our men fought through the en- 
filade fire of machine-guns as far as the slopes of Hill 35, 
and to the right of this the Scots made a gallant and fierce 
assault towards Bremen Redoubt. 

August 30 
The sky of Flanders is still full of wind and water, and 
heavy rain-storms driven by the gale sweep over the bat- 
tlefield, flinging down trees already broken by shell-fire. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 311 

Behind the lines some of the hopfields round Poperinghe 
and other villages are sadly wrecked. Many of the hop- 
poles have fallen, and the long trailing hops lie all tangled 
in the mire. Many telephone wires were down also just 
after the gale, and the signallers had a rough windy time 
in getting them up again. But it is on the field of battle 
that this weather matters most, and there in such places as 
Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse and Sanctuary Wood 
on our side of the lines, the linked shell-craters are ponds. 
In and between them is a quagmire. 

I write of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse rather 
than of the ground farther north, in the valley of the Steen- 
beek, though that is just as bad, or a little worse, because 
yesterday I went to see the troops of the 14th Division who 
made the last attack in those sinister woodlands in the 
track of the London men who fought there so desperately 
on July 31. 

The last attack, beginning on August 22, was made by 
light-infantry regiments, among whom were the Duke of 
Cornwall's and the Somerset Light Infantry. They were 
fine well-trained men — trained hard and trained long in the 
tactics of assault — and though they took ground which 
they could not hold, because the enemy was in great 
strength against them and they were weakened after hard 
fighting in frightful ground, they held off repeated coun- 
ter-attacks and inflicted great loss upon the enemy, and held 
their original line intact against most fierce assaults. The 
enemy's storm troops advanced against them through In- 
verness Copse, and in encircling movements which tried to 
get round and through their flanks again and again, during 
two days of violent fighting, they counter-attacked behind 
the barrage-fire of many batteries, so that all the groimd 
held by our men was swept by high explosives and shrapnel 
hour after hour, and when these waves of Saxons and 
Prussians were broken or repulsed, others came with a 
sheet of flame before them — from "flammenwerfer" ma- 
chines, which project fire like water from a fireman's hose. 



312 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Our riflemen and light infantry did not break before this 
advancing furnace, but fired into the heart of it, and saw 
some of the "flammenwerfer" men go up in their own 
flame like moths bursting in the light of a candle with loud 
reports, "a loud pop" as the men describe it, so that noth- 
ing of them was left but a little smoke and a few cinders. 

But that was at the end of the battle, and the light-in- 
fantry battalions had nought through terrible hours before 
they faced that last ordeal. Before the attack they held a 
line opposite Glencorse Wood on the left and running 
down on the right past Stirling Castle, the old German 
fort above a nest of dug-outs, which has become famous 
in all this fighting. In front of them lay Inverness Copse, 
a thousand yards long by 500 deep, with many concrete 
blockhouses hidden, or half hidden, among the fallen trees 
and tattered stumps and upheaved earth of this blasted 
wood; and north-east of that, ruins of an old chateau 
called Herenthage Castle. 

Facing our left were three lines of battered trenches 
north of Inverness Copse, and two blockhouses called L- 
shaped Farm — on an aeroplane photograph it looks exactly 
like the capital letter — and Fitzclarence Farm. These places 
were strongly garrisoned, and the German machine-gunners 
were safe within their concrete walls from any shell-splin- 
ters. Our barrage swept on to the enemy's lines, flung up 
the earth, crashed among the trees, and tore all this belt of 
land to chaos, where already it was deeply cratered by the 
earlier bombardment. Behind that barrage went over the 
light-infantry battalions, and immediately they came under 
gusts of machine-gun fire from the blockhouses which still 
stood intact. It was then 7 o'clock in the morning. They 
forced their way into Inverness Copse, followed by some 
Tanks, and roved round one of the blockhouses, where 
thirty Germans sat inside with their steel doors shut and 
their machine-guns firing through the loop-holes. Some 
sappers were sent for, and blew in the doors, and the gar- 
rison were killed fighting. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS SIS 

The Duke of Cornwall's men were checked for a time by 
machine-gun fire from Glencorse Wood, and advance waves 
were held up round a blockhouse with a garrison of sixty 
men north of Inverness Copse, but after fierce fighting this 
place fell, and not a man escaped. The Somerset Light 
Infantry passed on, and fought their way to the rubbish- 
heap called Herenthage Chateau, where a hundred and 
twenty Germans of the 145th Infantry Regiment held out 
in concrete chambers. Only their officer remained alive 
after the fighting here, and he was brought in a prisoner. 

The Somersets established themselves in their goal with 
posts in front of Inverness Copse and Herenthage Castle, 
but on the left the Cornish lads were held up by machine- 
gun fire east of "Clapham Junction," where there was an- 
other fortified farm with sixty men and six machine-guns 
inside. A Tank came up and sat outside the place, firing 
point-blank at its walls, and the Cornwalls followed it and 
burst the doors in and fought until again not a single Ger- 
man remained alive, after a terrible bayonet contest. So 
the attack had succeeded, but with forces now heavily re- 
duced. It was now ten o'clock in the morning. The story 
that follows is one long series of counter-attacks. It be- 
gan with a barrage which came down with a tempest of 
shells half-way through Inverness Copse. For miles 
around the German batteries concentrated their fire on 
this ground and raked it. From the east of Inverness 
Copse, and at the same time from the south, storming par- 
ties of Germans advanced behind this great gun-fire and, 
though the first attack was broken and then the second by 
rifles and machine-guns, a third developed in greater 
strength. A runner cane down from the Somersets — one 
of those brave runners who all day long and next day 
worked to and fro through dreadful barrage-fire until 
many were killed and other men went out to search for 
those dead boys and look for their dispatches, unless they 
had been blown to bits. The message from the Somersets 
reported that they could not hold on. They were being 



814 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

enclosed on both flanks, and proposed to fall back half-way 
through Inverness Copse, and this was done. Some re- 
serves from light-infantry battalions were thrown in to 
strengthen the line, and the Comwalls threw out a de- 
fensive flank with strong points. 

At midday another attack was made on the Somersets, 
and driven off by rifles and machine-guns, and at two 
o'clock they reported that the enemy was massing in an 
attempt to turn their left flank, which was then weak. The 
artillery answered an urgent call, and the German assembly 
was destroyed. So the evening came and the night, and 
the Light Infantry held on east of Stirling Castle and partly 
in Inverness Copse with many dead and wounded about 
them, and lines of German dead in front of them, await- 
ing riflemen coming to their support. 

In a brigade headquarters a group of oflficers waited 
more anxiously for this help, having more responsibility. 
They sat with wet towels about their heads and eyes, in 
poisonous fumes and dreadful stenches which crept down 
from above, where heavy shells burst incessantly, shaking 
all the earth and blowing out the candles. The concrete 
ceiling bulged in. Runners came in white- faced and shak- 
ing, after frightful journeys, and officers bent to the can- 
dlelight to read scribbled messages sent down by hard- 
pressed men. Outside were the groans of wounded men. 

At dawn, Tanks went out to attack the strong points 
north of Inverness Copse, where the enemy had rallied 
again, and one of them approached Fitzclarence Farm 
and broke up a counter-attacking preparation there. Some 
Germans ran into the blockhouse there and shot down the 
steel doors and lay doggo. Others came out of a trench 
to attack the Tank, but fled before the fire. Later in the 
morning German aeroplanes came out and flew very low 
and played their machine-guns on to our men, but without 
doing much harm. 

From I A.M. to 3.30 a.m. the enemy kept a terrific bar- 
rage over all our ground, and then flamed out all along 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS S15 

the line the signal of a new counter-attack. It was the 
"flammenwerfer" attack against the Duke of Cornwall's 
Light Infantry, and the whole sky was red with the light 
of these advancing fire-jets. For a time, in spite of the 
enemy's heavy losses, the Cornwalls had to retire before 
these far-reaching flames, but they rallied and went for- 
ward again, driving the enemy part of the way back, where 
he was swept by our artillery-fire. The enemy kept up a 
steady barrage-fire over three wide belts, and an officer 
who went up to report the position had the worst hours of 
his life on that journey through bursting shells and over 
the fields of dead. But in spite of a message that had come 
down reporting a new withdrawal, it was found that the 
line was intact, and that the thin ranks of Light Infantry 
and King's Royal Rifles had beaten back all the enemy's 
assaults, and had destroyed their spirit for further attacks 
by most deadly losses. We could not hold Inverness Copse, 
but the fighting here was worthy of men who, during two 
years of war, have fought with steadfast courage and have 
many acts of heroism in their long record. 



13 

The Slaughter-House of Lens 

August 23 
One day, when it is possible to get in and around Lens, the 
veil will be torn from a human charnel-house, or, rather, 
from charnel-houses which none of us may yet enter or 
see through the drifting smoke. Yesterday I looked down 
on Lens and saw its roofless buildings and its gaping walls, 
but I could only guess at the scenes which are hidden below 
ground there in the tunnels where the Germans assemble 
for their counter-attacks against the Canadians, and to 
which they drag back their dead and wounded. Those 
places must reek with the smell of death and corruption. 



S16 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

for the losses of the Prussian. Guards during the last few 
days, and of other divisions who have come up against the 
Canadians, have been, I am told and believe, enormous. 
The Canadians tell me that their troops have never had 
harder or more prolonged fighting, not even in their old 
days of the Ypres salient nor on the Somme. Every hun- 
dred yards of the ground they have taken, and during 
the last week or so they have taken thousands of yards 
of open country and of ruined streets in and about the 
mining cites, until they have forced their way into Lens 
itself, have been contested by desperate fighting and held 
against unceasing counter-attacks delivered by great bodies 
of picked German troops supported by monstrous bom- 
bardments. Imagination can, if it likes, picture the 
slaughter involved in all this to those German assault 
troops, because they have not succeeded in gaining their 
purpose, and counter-attacks like that, in those numbers 
and in that strength, are shattered when they do not suc- 
ceed. It is a wonderful tribute to the Canadians and to 
their grim tenacity that, after all the repeated counter-at- 
tacks against them, and after storms of fire from batteries 
which have increased in number every day, they hold their 
lines round Lens intact as they stood on August 15 and 16, 
and have gained an entry into the streets of Lens and 
swung up southwards with increasing pressure. 

Lens is packed tight with German troops. They be- 
long to the 4th Guards Division, and latterly to the ist 
Guards Resei:ve, the crack division of the German army, 
which had a month's rest at Cambrai before being sent into 
this slaughter-house. For although that city is tunnelled 
throughout, all the cellars being linked up and strengthened 
with massive concrete, so that even heavy shells cannot 
pierce down to them, men cannot fight in tunnels if they 
are on the offensive, and must get out of them to make 
their counter-attacks. It is at those times that they suffer 
more hideously than in any other battle. 

Our aeroplanes are always watching for these assem- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 31T 

blies. To take only one case out of many, they reported 
a mass of men in a certain square of Lens the day before 
yesterday. Our guns turned on to them, not only our field- 
guns but our heavies, up to those howitzers which could 
batter down a massive fortress after a few rounds. Men 
under the fire of such shells as those things send do not 
escape in great numbers. Most of them die. The Prus- 
sians in the square of Lens were caught by this hurricane 
fire, and before they could get into the tunnels many were 
blown to bits. 

Yesterday as I looked down on Lens the fire had 
quietened on both sides, as though the guns were tired. 
For several minutes at a time there was a great quietude 
over the city of doom, and as the afternoon sun lay warm 
upon its red walls, and cast black shadows across its de- 
serted streets, where no single figure walked, it was hard 
to believe that a few hours before swarms of men had 
been fighting on the edge of those houses, and that the 
place was full of new dead and old. The water of the 
Souchez river was as blue as the sky, which was deep bright 
blue above wispy clouds. A little light glinted from the 
white church tower which a shell has smashed off at the 
top. Perhaps some German officer was there staring 
through his glasses, or perhaps it was only a bit of metal 
caught by the sun. A smoke-barrage drifted densely across 
the northern side of the city, and every now and then there 
came a sharp vicious hammering of machine-guns to show 
that somewhere in those ruins men were alive and watch- 
ful. Then the guns got busy again, but in a slow, unhur- 
ried way. The enemy had a hate against the outer edge of 
Lievin, and every two minutes smote it with a great shell, 
which burst with big billowing smoke-clouds, and a flash 
which was followed by a low, sullen roar. He flung shells 
as big as this into Angres and Avion, but seemed to rely 
on machine-gun fire to barrage our lines nearest to his own. 
Behind me to the right were some of our big howitzers, 
old friends of mine, whose voices I prefer at a mile or 



318 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

two's distance. They tuned up their bass viols and played 
their dead march. Perhaps it was their shells I saw smash- 
ing on to the German defences. Rosy clouds went up, and 
in those clouds the dust of red-brick houses went up, too, 
leaving gaps of nothingness where the buildings had once 
been. There was a kite-balloon in the sky behind me with 
the wispy clouds like white horse-tails all curled about it, 
and presently there came riding above it several coveys of 
aeroplanes, so that the sky was filled with their loud drone- 
song. They flew round about Lens, and only a few Ger- 
man "Archies" tried to strafe them with bursts of shrap- 
nel. They flew not very high above the mining city, circling 
round and round like hawks before swooping to their prey. 
The guns were loud but shrill; and sweet and clear above 
them a bugle sounded from some camp of ours behind the 
lines among the cornfields all gold and glowing in the even- 
ing light, with a little shadow sleeping beside each stook; 
and it blew the evening retreat. It is the first time I have 
heard a bugle play that call so near to the guns, and it 
stirred one's heart with a queer sense of emotion, as though 
its music belonged to the spirit world. The night closed 
down on the battlefields but did not bring peace. Below 
the stars there were many strange lights and fires and 
sounds. A tall bank of clouds was pierced with lightning 
so like shell-fire, except for a longer tremor of light, that 
men looked and wondered what devilry was on over there 
in the back areas. The devilry was round about. It was 
time for the German raiders to come out under the cover 
of darkness, and they came and dropped their bombs over 
quiet villages and among the cornfields and the hop-gar- 
dens. The explosions came up with sharp flashes and gruff 
roars from dark fields between black belts of trees. From 
the earth hands of light stretched up, reaching up to the 
clouds and touching them with their finger-tips. They felt 
their way for those flying raiders, groped about like hands 
searching in a dark room, and then clasped each other. In 
the archway below their long straight arms shrapnel 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 319 

glinted like confetti. Our anti-aircraft guns had got their 
target. Along the lines rockets were rising, giving a sec- 
ond or two of white steady light to No Man's Land, with 
fringes of trees etched blackly against it. Somewhere a 
dump — ours or the enemy's — had been hit, and the clouds 
above it were tipped with scarlet flame. So then the night 
scene began as usual, and as it is played out below the, 
stars every night. And somewhere in Lens the Prussians 
were preparing for a new counter-attack, while German 
doctors in deep tunnels stared down upon a mass of 
wounded which was their day's harvest. Into one of the 
houses there the night before, where fifteen German sol- 
diers lay in the cellar after a day of prodigious fighting, a 
party of Canadian raiders appeared and dragged them all 
out to a ditch over the way in the Canadian lines. Well 
may the German prisoners say to these men of ours, "You 
give us no rest." There is never a night's rest in Lens nor 
round about it unless rnen are put to sleep for ever. Many 
of them were put to sleep by thousands of gas-shells fired 
into the town by our artillery a night ago as an answer 
to German gas. Perhaps they were glad of it, for the 
wakeful hours in Lens must be hell on earth. 

August 24 
To the south of Lens there is a slag-heap overgrown with 
weeds called the. Green Grassier. It is clearly visible across 
the Souchez river beyond a broken bridge, and I have often 
seen it from the lower slopes of Vimy. • It was the scene 
of fierce fighting yesterday, for in the morning the Cana- 
dians, who are showing an indomitable spirit after ten days 
of most furious attacks and counter-attacks, launched an 
assault upon it and seized the position. Later in the day 
the enemy came back in strength and, after violent eflforts, 
succeeded in thrusting the Canadians off the crest of this 
old mound of cinders, though they still cling to the western 
side. It is another incident in the long series of fierce 
and bloody encounters which since the battle of Vimy, on 



320 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAEUE 

April 9, have surrounded the city of Lens and given to 
its streets and suburbs a sinister but historic fame. The 
Canadians have fought here with astounding resolution. 
They have hurled themselves against fortress positions, and 
by sheer courage have smashed their way through streets 
entangled with quick-set hedges of steel, through houses 
alive with machine-gun fire, through trenches dug between 
concrete forts, through tunnels under red-brick ruins, 
sometimes too strong to be touched by shell-fire, and 
through walls loopholed for rifle-fire and hiding machine- 
gun emplacements designed to enfilade the Canadian line of 
advance. Through the cites of St. -Laurent, St.-Theodore, 
and St.-Emilie, to the north and west of Lens, they have 
fought past high slag-heaps and pit-heads, along railway 
embankments, and down sunken roads, until they have 
broken a route through frightful defences to the western 
streets of the inner city. 

Every day, and sometimes many times a day, they have 
been counter-attacked by swarms of Germans coming up 
out of their tunnels, and between these attacks they have 
been under terrific gun-fire from a wide semicircle of 
heavy batteries. In the early days of the war the French 
fought like this through the streets of Vermelles, smashing 
their way from one wall to another, from one house to 
another, and over trenches dug across the streets. That 
fighting in Vermelles stands as one of the most frightful 
episodes of the war, and when I first went there I stood 
aghast at the relics of this bloody struggle. But Vermelles 
is hardly more than a village, and the mining district of 
Lens, with all its suburbs, covers several square miles of 
ground, so that the Canadians have had a longer and a 
harder task. Six German divisions have attacked them in 
turn, and have been shattered against them. These are the 
7th and 8th, the 4th Guards Division, the nth Reserve, 
the 220th, and the ist Guards Reserve Division. In addi- 
tion to these six divisions, some portions, at any rate, of 
the 185th Division and of the 36th Reserve Division have 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 321 

been engaged. The total German strength used at Lens 
must well exceed fifty battalions, and the German losses 
may perhaps be estimated at between 12,000 to 15,000 men. 

The Canadians themselves have been hard pressed at 
times, but have endured the exhaustion of a savage strug- 
gle with amazing strength of spirit, grimly and fiercely 
resolved to hold their gains, unless overwhelmed by num- 
bers in their advanced positions, as it has sometimes hap- 
pened to them. But it is no wonder that some of the men 
whom I met yesterday coming out of that city of blood 
and death looked like men who had suffered to the last 
limit of mental and bodily resistance. Their faces were 
haggard and drawn. Their eyes were heavy. Their skin 
was grey as burnt ash. Some of them walked like 
drunken men, drunk with sheer fatigue, and as soon as 
they had reached their journey's end some of them sat 
under the walls of a mining village with their chalky hel- 
mets tilted back, drugged by the need of sleep, but too 
tired even for that. They were men of the battalions who 
three days ago came face to face with the enemy in No 
Man's Land, a stretch of barren cratered earth between 
St.-Emilie and the northern streets of Lens, and fought 
him there until many dead lay strewn on both sides, and 
their ammunition was exhausted. An officer of one of 
these battalions came out of a miner's cottage to talk to 
me. He was a very young man with a thin, clean-shaven 
face, which gave him a boyish look. He was too weary to 
stand straight and too weary to talk more than a few jerky 
words. He leaned up against the wall of the miner's cot- 
tage, and passed a hand over his face and eyes, and said : 

"I'm darned tired. It was the hell of a fight. We fought 
to a finish, and when we had no more bombs of our own 
we picked up Heine's bombs and used those." [The Cana- 
dians call their enemy Heine and not Fritz.] "Heine was 
at least three times as strong as us, and we gave him hell. 
It was hand-to-hand fighting — rifles, bombs, bayonets, butt- 
ends, any old way of killing a man, and we killed a lot. 



FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

But he broke our left flank, and things were bloody in the 
centre. He had one of his strong points there, and swept 
us with machine-gun fire. My fellows went straight for 
it, and a lot of them got wiped out. But we got on top of 
it and through the wire, and held the trench beyond until 
Heine came down with swarms of bombers." 

This young Canadian officer was stricken by the loss 
of many of his men. "The best crowd that any fellow 
could command," and he had been through indescribable 
things under enormous shell-fire, and he had had no sleep 
for days and nights, and could not sleep now for thinking 
of things. But he smiled grimly once or twice when he 
reckoned up the enemy's losses. The remembrance of the 
German dead he had seen seemed like strong wine to his 
soul. "We made them pay," was his summing up of the 
battle. The nightmare of it all was still heavy on him, and 
he spoke v/ith a quiet fierceness about the enemy's losses 
and the things he had endured in a way which would scare 
poor, simple souls who think that war is a fine picturesque 
business. 

A senior officer of a battahon on the flank of his was a 
different type of man — a very tall, strong- featured man of 
middle age, like an English squire of the old style, with a 
fine smiling light in his eyes, in spite of all he had been 
through, and with a vivid way of speech that would not 
come fast enough to say splendid things about his men, to 
describe the marvellous way in which they had fought in 
frightful conditions, to praise first one and then another 
for the things they had done when things were at their 
worst. He had been addressing some of the survivors of 
this battle when I came upon him, and I saw them march 
away, straightening themselves up before this officer of 
theirs, and proud because he was pleased with them. He 
thanked them for one thing above all, and that was for 
the gallant way in wnich, after all their fighting, they had 
gone out to fetch in their dead and wounded, so that not 
one wounded man lay out there to die or to be taken pris- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 323 

oner, and the dead were brought back for burial. He said 
a word, too, for Heine, as they call him. The Germans 
had not sniped or machine-gunned the stretcher-bearers, but 
had sent their own men out on the same mission too. That 
was after the battle, and there was no surrendering while 
the fighting was on. 

This officers' story was as wonderful as anything I have 
heard in this war. And the man himself was wonderful, 
for he had had no sleep for six days and nights, and had 
suffered the fearful strain of his responsibility for many 
men's lives ; yet now, when I met him straight from all that, 
he was bright-eyed and his mind was as clear as a bell, and 
the emotion that surged through him was well controlled. 
He described the things I have attempted to describe be- 
fore — the fortified streets and houses of Lens, which make 
it one great fortress, tunnelled from end to end with exits 
into concrete forts two yards thick in cement, in the ruined 
cottages. On the morning of our attack the enemy was 
expecting it, and within a minute and a half of our barrage 
put down his own barrage with terrific intensity. So there 
were the Canadians between two walls of high explosives, 
and it was between that inferno that they fought in the 
great death struggle. For the Canadians had already ad- 
vanced towards the enemy's line, and in greater numbers — 
three times as great — he had advanced to ours, and the 
two forces met on the barren stretch of earth crossed by 
twisted trenches, which for a time had been No Man's 
Land. 

While the battalion on the left was heavily engaged fight- 
ing with rifles and bombs until their ammunition gave out, 
and then with bayonets and butt-ends, the battalion on 
the right was working southward and eastward to the 
northern outskirts of Lens. They came up at once against 
the fortress houses from which machine-gun and rifle fire 
poured out. The Canadians in small parties tried to sur- 
round these places, but many were swept down. Some of 
them rushed close to the walls of one house, which was a 



SM FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

bastion of the northern defences of Lens, and were so close 
that the machine-guns, through slits in the walls, could not 
fire at them. They even established a post behind it and 
beyond it, quite isolated from the rest of their men, but 
clinging to their post all day. The enemy dropped bombs 
upon them through the loopholes and sand-bagged windows, 
fired rifle-grenades at them, and tried to get machine-guns 
at them, but there were always a few men left to hold 
the post, until at last, when the line withdrew elsewhere, 
they were recalled. One house near here, into which a party 
of Canadians forced their way, was a big arsenal. Its 
cellars were crammed with shells and piled boxes of bombs. 
In other cellars were dead bodies, and the stench of corrup- 
tion mingled with the stale vapour of gas. Down in one 
of these vaults a young Canadian soldier stayed with his 
officer, who was badly wounded, and could not leave him, 
but waited until night, when he carried the officer back to 
safety. 

Before that night came there were great German counter- 
attacks. Masses of men carrying nothing but stick-bombs, 
which they had slung around them, advanced down the 
communication-trenches and flung these things at the Ca- 
nadians of the left battalion, who were fighting out in the 
open, and in another communication-trench with the right 
battalion. The enemy walked over the piled corpses of his 
own dead before he could drive back the Canadians, but 
by repeated storming parties he did at last force them to 
give way and retreat down the trench to gain the support 
of their comrades of the other battalion, which had not 
been so hard pressed. These came to the rescue, and for a 
long time held the German grenadiers at bay. The fight- 
ing was fierce and savage on both sides. 

At last, weakened by their losses and with failing stores 
of ammunition, these two battalions were given the order 
to retire to a trench farther back, and the survivors of the 
most desperate action in Canadian history withdrew, still 
fighting, and established blocks in the communication- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 325 

trenches down which the enemy was bombing, so that they 
could not pass those points to the Hne upon which here 
on the north of Lens the Canadians had fallen back. South- 
ward there had been no withdrawal, and other battalions 
had forced their way forward a good distance, shutting up 
that entrance to the city and getting down into the deep 
tunnels, over which there howled the unceasing fire of the 
German heavies. Our own guns were hard at work, and 
I have already told how the Prussians were destroyed in 
the square of Lens by 12-inch shells and shrapnel. 

I could write more, but I have written enough. The 
Canadians never had fighting so hard as this, but the losses 
they have inflicted upon the enemy have made Lens a Prus- 
sian tomb, so that its tunnels are death vaults. The heart 
of the city is still a fortress, and the new garrison is still 
strong there, so that, like Thiepval, which held out for 
many weeks after it was enclosed on three sides, Lens will 
not fall in a night. But as a dwelling-place for German 
troops it is a city of abomination and dreadfulness. 



14 
The Agony of Armentieres 

September 15 
The harvests of France and Flanders have been gathered 
in, and already the plough, driven by men too old to fight 
or boys too small and young, or by peasant women whose 
men are somewhere near St.-Quentin or Verdun, is turning 
up the stubble in the fields and making a brown landscape 
where three weeks ago it was all gold and bronze. 

The trees are turning brown also, deepening to a reddish 
tint in all the woods between Boulogne and the battlefields, 
where there are only dead trees. Round about Poperinghe 
the trailing hops have been pulled down from their poles, 
already stripped in places by last month's gale, and the 



S26 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

sticks are all bare. Outside the wooden huts built on the 
edge of war by refugees from Ypres and shell-broken vil- 
lages, Flemish women sit with the hops in their laps and 
in great baskets beside them, and British soldiers on the 
march with dry throats exchange remarks about the good 
beer which they may never have the luck to drink. White 
cloud-mountains which turn black and threaten a deluge 
between bursts of sunshine are banked up above the russet 
foliage and the brown earth and the old black windmills 
which wave their arms across the landscape, and in the 
wind there is a smell of moisture and mist, and the first 
faint sniff of rotting leaves. It is the autumn touch — the 
autumn touch of a war in which some of us have seen four 
harvests gathered into French barns and four winters come. 
It makes one feel a bit sad, that thought. It puts an autumn 
touch for a second or two into the souls of men coming 
back from leave as I came back with some of them two 
days ago. 

By day the sky out here is full of interest, for one cannot 
go anywhere near the lines without seeing that aerial ac- 
tivity which has become intense and fierce lately. Yester- 
day I saw a great flight of our aeroplanes over the dead 
town of Armentieres. There were between twenty and 
thirty of them making their way over the German lines, 
and the enemy hated the sight of them. His anti-aircraft 
guns got to work savagely and bursts of black shrapnel filled 
the sky all about those steady wings, but did not bring them 
down. He hated other aircraft watching over his lines — 
a long line of kite-balloons, ''clustered like grapes," as some 
one described them, in our side of the sky. They were as 
white as snow when the sun touched them, and made tempt- 
ing targets for long-range guns. Some German gunners 
registered on one of them nearest to Armentieres, and I saw 
a terrific burst of yellow smoke, so close to it that it seemed 
like a hit. But the smoke cleared, and the kite balloon 
stayed calmly on its wire, and there was no parachute dem- 
onstration by our observers in the basket. The drone of 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 327 

our aeroplanes and the reports of German anti-aircraft guns 
made the only noise in Armentieres — that and the sound of 
two men's footsteps as I and another walked through the 
streets of that town which is dead. 

It is a queer thing to walk through a big town out of 
which all life has gone, and queer to me especially in Armen- 
tieres, because I knew it not long ago when there were many 
women and girls about its streets, and when one could take 
one's choice of tea-shops — though only eighteen hundred 
yards away from the German line — and get an excellent 
little dinner in more than one restaurant. One could have 
one's hair cut and a shampoo to the musical accompaniment 
of field-batteries outside the town, and buy most of the 
things a man wants in the simple life of war (except peace) 
in shops kept by brave Frenchwomen — women too brave 
and too rash because they lived within 1800 yards of the 
enemy's line as though it were eighteen miles. Armentieres 
was a modern little manufacturing town for lace and thread, 
with neat red-brick houses kept by well-to-do people who 
liked good comfortable furniture,' and put a piano into their 
front parlour and a little marble Venus and other knick- 
knacks of art on the drawing-room table as a proof of good 
taste above the mere sordid interest of money-making. 

For a long time in the war that town has been known 
to British soldiers who have passed it on their way to 
Plug Street as "Armentears." They made friends with 
some of the girls in the tea-shops, and said "Hallo, granny! 
Tray bong !" to old ladies who sold them picture post cards. 
Now it is a town of tears to any people who once lived 
there. The tea-shops have been smashed to bits and the 
women and the girls have gone, unless their bodies lie in 
the cellars beneath the ruins. The agony of Armentieres 
began at the end of June, when the enemy first began to 
bombard it with systematic violence, and though there is no 
life left in it the broken houses are still battered by more 
shells when the enemy's gunners have nothing else to do. 
When I walked through its streets yesterday I was the 



328 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

witness of the horror that had passed. The German bom- 
bardment began quite suddenly one night, and the old 
women and the girls and the children were in their beds. 
They rushed down into their cellars, not for the first time, 
because during nearly three years of war stray shells had 
often come into the town. But never like this. These were 
not random shells, scattered here and there. They came 
with a steady and frightful violence into every part of the 
town, sweeping down street after street, blowing houses 
to dust, knocking the fronts off the shops, playing fantastic, 
horrible tricks of choosing and leaving, as shell-fire does 
in any town of this size. There were gas-shells among the 
high explosives, and their poison filtered down into the 
cellars. A fire broke out in one of the squares beyond the 
old church of St.-Vaast, and the houses were gutted by 
flames, which licked high above their roofless walls. 

The fires were out when I walked there yesterday, and the 
church of St.-Vaast was surrounded by its own ruins — 
great blocks of masonry hurled from its dome and but- 
tresses amidst a mass of broken glass. Inside there is a 
tragic ruin, and rows of cane chairs lie in wild chaos among 
the broken pillars and the piled stones. The pipes of the 
great organ have been flung out of their framework, but 
curiously the side altars, with the figures of apostles and 
saints, and the central figure of the Sacred Heart, are hardly 
touched, and stand unscathed amidst this great destruction. 
There is nothing new in all this. For three years I have 
been walking through destroyed towns and villages, but it 
has the grim interest of recent history, and Armentieres 
is the scene of a tragedy to its civilian population which 
makes one's heart ache with a new revolt against this mon- 
strous cruelty of war upon the innocent and the helpless. 

It was easy to see what had happened during those days 
and nights of terror some weeks ago. I looked into the 
blown-out fronts of little shops and houses, and saw how 
everything had been abandoned in that rush of women and 
children to the cellars. In spite of the wreckage of the 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 329 

upper stories and of the walls about them, some of the 
rooms were intact. Here were the remains of an estaminet, 
with its cash-box on the bar counter, and games such as 
soldiers love — dominoes and darts, and quoits and bagatelle, 
set out as though for an evening's entertainment. Here 
was a chemist's shop, with many bottles unbroken on the 
shelves, though most of the house was blown across the 
street. I looked through a hole in the wall to a drawing- 
room, with a piano, standing amid a litter of broken furni- 
ture, as though some madman had wreaked his fury on the 
sofa and chairs. 

But it was in the cellars that the pitiful drama had been 
— in those cellars down which I peered wondering whether 
any poor bodies lay there still. The shells had pierced 
down to some of the women hiding in them. Poison-gas 
came to choke some of them. Rescue parties of our 
R.A.M.C, went into Armentieres immediately to get the 
poor creatures away, and risked their lives a score of times 
on each journey they made. It is an amazing thing that 
even then, in spite of their terror and their agony and 
their wounds, many of the old women could hardly be 
made to leave the town, and clung desperately to their 
homes, though these had fallen down on top of them. 

Outside Armentieres yesterday I met one of the R.A.M.C. 
lads who had helped in this rescue work — he has been 
given a MiHtary Medal for it — and he told me of his trou- 
ble with two old ladies when things were at their worst. 
Neither had a rag of clothing on except the blankets he 
wrapped round them as they lay on stretchers; but when 
his attention wandered from them, owing to shells which 
burst close to the ambulance, one of these old dames scram- 
bled up and ran off naked down the street. He went after 
her, and on his return found that the other old lady had 
given him the slip. 

He had astounding experiences, this Wessex boy who is 
an expert in bandaging wounds, and through many days 
of dreadfulness and many nights he worked in Armentieres 



330 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

under heavy fire, and did not turn a hair. He was such a 
Mark Tapley that when everything was falHng about him 
and Hell was let loose he became more and more cheerful 
and refused to take things seriously. 

"I don't think I ever laughed so much," he told me yes- 
terday. "I don't know how it was, but I couldn't help see- 
ing the comical side of it all, in spite of the ghastly sights." 
I suppose this boy's sense of humour was touched by the 
monstrous idiocy of the shell-fire, which produced effects 
like those on a music-hall stage when the funny man breaks 
all the crockery and brings the roof down over his head. 
He laughed like anything when he was shelled out of his 
makeshift dressing-station on one side of the street, and 
had to establish his quarters on the other side of another 
street. 

"How's it going, my lad!" asked his officer, who came 
to visit the aid post. 

"Well, sir," he answered, "it's rather hotter than the 
last place, except for direct hits." 

He laughed "like anything" again when a shell came 
through the kitchen and smashed up the stove, and failed 
to kill an old lady, already covered with bruises but very 
talkative. He laughed again when they had to pack up 
traps in a hurry, with the stiff body of a small dead child 
on the top of the kit and a barrage down the street. 

"This is the funniest old show I ever did see," was the 
comment of the boy from Wessex, and certainly, when one 
comes to think, of it, it is a funny thing that such things 
should happen in this civilized world of ours and in this 
Christian age. But the boy from Wessex, and others like 
him, did not let their sense of humour get the better of 
their pity or their work of rescue. They crawled out and 
dragged in the bodies of dead or wounded people. 

Down below in the cellars was a crowd of poor people, 
mostly women and girls, and when the shell-fire was at its 
height their wailing and their prayers were rather trouble- 
some to the Wessex boy and his comrades upstairs bandag- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 331 

ing the wounded. The R.A.M.C. men, at most deadly risk 
to themselves, managed to clear most of the cellars, carry- 
ing out the people on shutters, and taking them away in 
ambulances to hospitals. To one of these casualty clearing- 
stations was brought a boy of nineteen, who had been 
gassed. He was a life-long parayltic and wizened like an 
old man, and deaf and dumb. Nobody knew where he 
had come from or to whom he belonged, but he had one 
creature faithful to him. It was a small dog, who came 
on the stretcher with him, sitting on his chest. It watched 
close to him when he lay in the hospital, and went away 
with him, sitting on his chest again, when he was sent 
farther away to another clearing-station. This dog's fidel- 
ity to the paralysed boy, who was deaf and dumb and 
gassed, seems to men who have seen many sights of war 
and this agony in Armentieres the most pitiful thing they 
know. 

Yesterday, apart from the knocking of anti-aircraft guns 
and the drone of our planes, it was all quiet there, and I 
walked through the silent streets over the broken bricks and 
glass, and was startled by the utter death of the town. For 
this quietude and ruin of a place that one has seen full of 
life gives one a sinister sensation, and one is frightened by 
one's loneliness. 

15 

The Battle of Menin Road 

September 20 
Our troops attacked this morning before six o'clock on a 
wide front north and south of the Ypres-Menin road, and 
have gained important ground all along the line. It is 
ground from which during the past six weeks there has 
been that heroic and desperate fighting which I have de- 
scribed as best I could in my daily messages, giving even 
at the best only a vague idea of the difficulties encountered 



S22 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

by those men of ours who made great sacrifices in great 
endeavours. It is the ground which in the centre rises up 
through the sinister woodlands of Glencorse Copse and 
Inverness Wood to the high ground of Polygon Wood and 
the spurs of the Passchendaele Ridge, which form the ene- 
my's long defensive barrier to the east of the Ypres salient. 
Until that high land was taken progress was difficult for 
our troops on the left across the Steenbeek, as the enemy's 
guns could still hold commanding positions. The ground 
over which our men have swept this morning had been 
assaulted again and again by troops who ignored their 
losses, and attacked with a most desperate and glorious 
courage, yet failed to hold what they gained for a time, 
because their final goal was attained with weakened forces 
after most fierce and bloody fighting. The Empire knows 
who those men were — the old English county regiments, 
who never fought more gallantly; the Scots, who only let 
go of their forward positions under overwhelming pressure 
and annihilating fire; the Irish divisions, who suffered the 
most supreme ordeal, and earned new and undying honour 
by the way they endured the fire of many guns for many 
days. As long as history lasts, the name of these woods, 
from which most of the trees have been swept, and of 
these bogs and marshes which lie about them, will be linked 
with the memory of those brave battalions who fought 
through them again and again. They are not less to be 
honoured than those who with the same courage, just as 
splendid, attacked once more, over the same tracks, past 
the same death-traps, and achieved success. By different 
methods, by learning from what the first men had suffered, 
this last attack has not as yet been high in cost, and we 
hold what the enemy has used all his strength and cunning 
to prevent us getting. He used much cunning and poured 
up great reserves of men and guns to smash our assaulting 
lines. For the first time on July 3 1 we came up against his 
new and fully prepared system of defence, and discovered 
the power of it. Abandoning the old trench system which 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 333 

we could knock to pieces with artillery, he made his for- 
ward positions without any definite line, and built a large 
number of concrete blockhouses, so arranged in depth that 
they defended each other by enfilade fire, and so strong that 
nothing but a direct hit from one of our heavier shells 
would damage it. And a direct hit is very difficult on a 
small mark like one of those concrete houses, holding about 
ten to twenty men at a minimum, and fifty to sixty in their 
largest. These little garrisons were mostly machine-gunners 
and picked men specially trained for outpost work, and 
they could inflict severe damage on an advancing battalion, 
so that the forward lines passing through and beyond them 
would be spent and weak. Then behind in reserve lay the 
German "Stosstruppen," specially trained also for counter- 
attacks, which were launched in strong striking forces 
against our advanced lines after all their struggle and loss. 
Those blockhouses proved formidable things — hard nuts 
to crack, as the soldiers said who came up against them. 
There are scores of them whose names will be remembered 
through a lifetime by men of many battalions, and they 
cost the lives of many brave men. Beck House and Borry 
Farm belong to Irish history. Wurst Farm and Winnipeg, 
Bremen Redoubt and Gallipoli, Iberian and Delva Farm, 
are strongholds round which many desperate little battles, 
led by young subalterns or sergeants, have taken place on 
the last day of July and on many days since. English and 
Scots have taken turns in attacking and defending such 
places as Fitzclarence Farm, Northampton Farm, and Black 
Watch Corner in the dreadful region of Inverness Copse 
and Glencorse Wood. To-day the hard nut of the concrete 
blockhouse has been cracked by a new method of attack and 
by a new assault, planned with great forethought, and 
achieved so far with high success. 

Among the troops engaged on the 2nd Army front were 
the Australians and South-Africans, Welsh and Scottish 
battalions, and many of the old English regiments, includ- 
ing the Cheshires, Warwicks, Worcesters, StaflFords, Wilt- 



334 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

shires, Gloucesters, Berkshires, Oxford and Bucks, York 
and Lancashires, Sherwood Foresters, and Rifle Brigade. 
The Divisions to which they belonged were, from north to 
south, the 2nd AustraHans, ist Austrahans, the 23rd and 
41st (with the 2ist and 23rd in reserve), the 39th, the 19th, 
the 30th, 14th, and 8th. 

I should like to give the full details of the preparations 
which have made this success possible and the methods by 
which some at least of the terrors of the blockhouse have 
been laid low, but it cannot yet be done, and it is enough 
now that good results have been attained. One thing was 
against us as usual last night. After several fine days the 
weather turned bad again, and last night many men must 
have looked up at the sky, groaned, and said, "Just our 
luck." At half-past ten it began to rain heavily, and all 
through the night there was a steady drizzle. It was awful 
to think of that ground about the woodlands, already full 
of water-holes and bogs, becoming more and more of a 
quagmire as the time drew near when our men have to rise 
from the mud and follow the barrage across the craters. 
All through the night our heavy guns were slogging, and 
through the dark wet mist there was the blurred light of 
their flashes. Before the dawn a high wind was raging 
at thirty miles an hour across Flanders, and heavy water- 
logged clouds were only 400 feet above the earth. How 
could our airmen see. When the attack began they could 
not see, even when they flew as low as 200 feet. They 
could see nothing but smoke, which clung low to the battle- 
fields, and they could only guess the whereabouts of Ger- 
man batteries. Later, when some progress had been made 
at most points of the attacking line, the sky cleared a little, 
blue spaces showed through the black storm-clouds, and 
there were gleams of sun striking aslant the mists. 

This sky on the salient was a strange vision, and I have 
seen nothing like it since the war began. It was filled with 
little black specks like midges, but each midge was a British 
aeroplane flying over the enemy's lines. The enemy tried 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 335 

to clear the air of them, and his anti-aircraft guns were 
firing wildly, so that all about them were puffs of black 
shrapnel. Behind, closely clustered, were our kite-balloons, 
like snow-clouds where they were caught by the light, star- 
ing down over the battle, and in wide semicircles about the 
salient our heavy guns were firing ceaselessly with dull, 
enormous hammer-strokes, followed by the shrill cry of 
travelling shells making the barrage before our men, and 
having blockhouses for their targets and building walls of 
flying steel between the enemy and our attacking troops. 
In the near distance were the strafed woods of old battle- 
grounds like the Wytschaete Ridge and Messines, with their 
naked gallows-trees all blurred in the mist. 

Our men had lain out all night in the rain before the 
attack at something before six. They were wet through to 
the skin, but it is curious that some of them whom I saw 
to-day were surprised to hear it had been raining hard. 
They had other things to think about. But some of them 
did not think at all Tired out in mind and body under 
the big nervous strain which is there, though they may be 
unconscious of it, they slept. 'T was wakened by a friend 
just before we went over," said one of them. The anxiety 
of the officers was intense for the hours to pass before the 
enemy should get a hint of the movement. It seemed that 
in one part of the line he did guess that something was 
in the wind and in the mist. This was on the line facing 
Glencorse Wood. An hour or two before the attack he 
put over a heavy barrage, but most of it missed the heads 
of the battalions. There were many casualties, but the men 
stood firm, never budging, and making no sound. They 
all thought that some of their comrades must have been 
badly caught, but, as far as I can find, it did not do great 
damage. 

All along the line the experience of the fighting was 
broadly the same. Apart from local details and difficulties, 
the ground was not quite so bad as had been expected, 
though bad enough, being greasy and boggy after the rain, 



336 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

but not impassable. The shell-holes were water-logged, 
and they were dangerously deep for badly wounded men 
who might fall in, but for the others there was generally 
a way round over ground which would hold, and our as- 
saulting waves who led the advance were lightly clad, and 
could go at a fair pace after the barrage. "I saw wounded 
men fall in the shell-holes," said a Warwickshire lad to-day, 
"and God knows how they got out again, unless the 
stretcher-bearers came up quick, as most of them did; but 
as for me, I had lain in a shell-hole all night up to the waist 
in mud, and I was careful to keep out of them." The 
barrage ahead of them was terrific — the most appalling 
fence of shells that has ever been placed before advancing 
troops in this war. All our men describe it as wonderful 
"Beautiful" is the word they use, because they know what 
it means in safety to them. 

In the direction of Polygon Wood the plan of attack 
seems to have worked like clockwork. The Australians 
moved forward behind the barrage stage by stage, through 
Westhoek and Nonne Boschen, and across the Hanebeek 
stream on their left, with hardly a check, in spite of the 
German blockhouses scattered over this country. In those 
blockhouses the small garrisons of picked troops had been 
demoralized, as any human beings would be, by the enor- 
mous shell-fire which had been flung around them. Some, 
but not all, it seems, of the blockhouses had been smashed, 
and in those still standing the German machine-gunners got 
their weapons to work with a burst or two of fire, but 
then, seeing our troops upon them, were seized with fear, 
and made signs of surrender. At nine o'clock this morn- 
ing the good news came back that the Australians were right 
through Glencorse Wood. Later messages showed that our 
troops were fighting their way into Polygon Wood. They 
swept over the strong points at Black Watch Corner, North- 
ampton Farm, and Carlisle Farm. There was stiff fighting 
round a blockhouse called Anzac Corner, east of the Hane- 
beek stream, and it was necessary to organize two flank 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 337 

attacks and work round it before the enemy machine-gun 
fire could be silenced by bombs. In another case near here 
the enemy came out of a blockhouse ready to attack, but 
when they saw our men swarming up, they lost heart and 
held up their hands. It is difficult to know how many pris- 
oners were taken here in these woods and strong points. 
The men's estimates vary enormously, some speaking of 
scores and others of hundreds. 

All this time, the enemy's artillery reply was not excep- 
tionally heavy, and, though it was prompt to come after the 
first SOS signals went up from his lines, it was erratic and 
varied very much in the success of our counter-battery work, 
which all through the night and for days past has been 
smothering his guns. South of the attack in Glencorse 
Copse and Polygon Wood the assault in Inverness Copse 
and Shrewsbury Forest, across the bog-lands round the 
Dumbarton Lakes, was made by English battalions, includ- 
ing the Queen's, the East and West Kents, the Northum- 
berland Fusiliers, Sherwood Foresters, the King's Royal 
Rifles, and the West Riding battalions. It was the vilest 
ground, low-lying and flooded, and strewn with broken 
trees and choked with undergrowth, but the troops here 
kept up a good pace, and flung themselves upon the block- 
houses which stood in their way. At an early hour our men 
were reported to be on a ridge south-east of Inverness Copse 
and going strong towards Veldhoek. The enemy's barrage 
came down too late, and one officer, who was wounded 
by a shell-splinter, led his men, i6o of them, to their first 
position with only nine casualties. 

Most of our losses to-day were from machine-gun fire 
out of the blockhouses, and that varied very much at dif- 
ferent parts of the line. There was some trouble at Het 
Pappotje Farm in this way, where a party of German 
machine-gunners put up a desperate resistance, shutting 
themselves in behind steel doors before they were routed 
out by a bombing fight. Southward from a strong point 
called Groenenburg, or "Green Bug" Farm, to Opaque 



338 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Wood by the Ypres-Comines Canal, the attack by the 
Cheshires, Wiltshires, Warwicks, Staffords, and Glouces- 
ters was successful, though the enemy still holds out up 
to the time I write in Hessian Wood, where he is defending 
himself in a group of blockhouses against the Welsh Regi- 
ment and Royal Welsh Fusiliers. 

I have dealt so far with the centre of the attack, and 
I know very little as to the fighting on the north by the 
5th Army, except that the Highlanders, London Territo- 
rials, Lancashire and Liverpool battalions, and Scots and 
South-Africans have swept past a whole system of block- 
houses, like Beck House and Borry Farm, running up 
through Gallipoli, Kansas Cross, and Wurst Farm, across 
the Langemarck-Zonnebeke road. All through the morn- 
ing our lightly wounded men came filtering down to the 
safer places in the Ypres salient and then to the quiet fields 
behind, and they were in grand spirits in spite of the mud 
which caked them and the smart of their wounds. Some 
of them were brought down on the trolley trains, which go 
almost as far as the battle-line, and some in open buses, 
and some by German prisoners, but there were many Ger- 
mans among the wounded — some of them with very ghastly 
wounds, and these took their place with ours and mingled 
with them in the dressing-stations, and were given the same 
treatment. Our wounded told some strange tales of their 
experiences, but there was no moan among them, whatever 
they had suffered. 

One man of the Cheshires described to me how he saw a 
German officer Tun out of a dug-out, which had been a block- 
house blown in at each end by our heavy shell-fire, and 
make for another one which still stood intact. With some 
of his comrades, our man chased him, and there was a 
great fight in the second blockhouse before the survivors 
surrendered, among them the officer, who gave to my friend 
a big china pipe and a case full of cigars as souvenirs. He 
was killed afterwards by one of his own men, who sniped 
him as he was walking back to our lines. In another strong 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 339 

point there was a great and terrible fight The Prussian 
garrison refused to surrender, and a party of ours fought 
them until they were destroyed. "It was more Hvely than 
Wytschaete," said a man who was in this fight. "It was less 
tame-Hke, and the Fritzes put up a better show." They 
fought hard round Prince's House and Jarrock's Farm and 
Pioneer House, not far from Hollebeke Chateau. 

The prisoners I saw to-day were shaken men. Most of 
them were young fellows of twenty-one, belonging to the 
1916 class, and there were none of the youngest boys among 
them. But they were white-faced and haggard, and looked 
like men who had passed through a great terror, which in- 
deed was their fate. They belonged mostly to the 207th 
Prussian Division, and had suffered before the battle from 
our great shell-fire, which had caused many casualties 
among their reliefs and ration parties. Many other pris- 
oners belonged to the 121st Division. I can only give this 
glimpse or two of the crowded scenes and the many details 
of to-day's battle. To-morrow there will be time perhaps 
to write more, giving a deeper insight into this day of good 
success, which is cheering after so much desperate fight- 
ing — over the same fields, although never to so far a goak 

September 21 
In spite of many German counter-attacks yesterday and 
many vain and costly attempts to counter-attack to-day, we 
hold all the ground gained by our men yesterday, except 
at one or two strong points, after their victorious progress. 
This morning when I went again among the men who have 
been fighting — there was a blue sky over the rags and tat- 
ters of the City of Ypres, and behind the tall, solitary tree- 
stumps on the ridge that goes up to Polygon Wood by way 
of Glencorse Copse, and all the air was filled with the song 
of many aeroplanes — all that I learned yesterday about 
the battle was made more certain by the narratives of these 
young soldiers, who are proud and glad of what they call 
a real good show. The wounded men walking down over 



340 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the wide stretch of fields, which are still under gun-fire, 
weak with loss of blood, suffering the first pain of their 
wounds, and shaken by their experiences under shells and 
machine-gun fire, spoke with a quiet enthusiasm of the day's 
success, and said "It was easy" behind such a colossal bar- 
rage as our guns rolled in front of them. Some of them in 
their eagerness went too fast for the barrage in order to 
chase the enemy, and I have met Australians here and there 
and some men of the Welsh Regiment, who fought farther 
south, wounded because they ran in front of the barrage- 
lines, and were caught in our shell-splinters. But that was 
a rare episode, and along the whole line of attack the men 
followed the moving walls of shells, vast shells that fling 
up masses of earth like suburban villas, and the smaller 
shells that fell like confetti, all glinting in the wet mist, 
and felt sure that the enemy in front of them would have 
lost all his fight when they reached his hiding-places, if any 
lived. Many Germans died on that ground, so that the 
shell-holes between the blockhouses are wet graves in which 
their bodies lie, and many of the blockhouses which resisted 
so long in former attacks are smashed, or at least so bat- 
tered that the garrisons inside were dazed and demoralized 
by the fearful hammering at their walls. 

There was a broad belt of death across that mile deep 
of woods and ridges and barren fields, but here and there, 
as I have already told, men stayed alive in the concrete 
houses and fought with their machine-guns to the last, and 
even kept sniping from shell-holes in which they had es- 
caped, up to the time our troops reached them. They were 
brave men, most of them, for it needs great courage to 
show any fighting spirit after such a fury of gun-fire, and 
50 per cent, of our prisoners are wounded, as I have seen 
myself, and the others are haggard and spent after their 
frightful adventure. An hour or two ago I met a column 
of them on the road, marching down slowly through a 
ruined village, and staring hollow-eyed at all the movement 
of our troops, at all the transport behind our lines, at 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 341 

all our whistling, busy Tommies, who glance back at them 
without any malice now that the battle is over. In a dress- 
ing-station a young wounded German sprang to his feet 
as I came in, and said, ''Good day, sir," very politely, but 
the pallor of his face was that of a dead man. The Ger- 
man officers who are prisoners show the same kind of 
eagerness to salute, which is a rare thing for them, and I 
hear that they do not disguise that yesterday was a day 
of great defeat for themselves, and of great victory for 
us. The completeness and quickness of it staggered them, 
and they speak of our barrage-fire as an awful phenomenon 
that has undone all their plans and destroyed the new 
method of defence which they believed could save them 
to the end. As wounded men or prisoners they see things 
darkly, and we should be deep in folly if we believed that 
all the enemy's strength of resistance is destroyed. But at 
least this is clear after yesterday, that the new German 
method of holding his lines lightly by small garrisons in 
blockhouses, with reserves behind for counter-attacks, has 
broken down, and by reverting to the old system of strong 
front lines he would suffer again as he suffered in the 
Somme under the ferocity of our artillery. 

The German officers have hard words to say about their 
Higher Command which has led them into this tragedy, and 
their own pride is broken. Yesterday the reserve divisions, 
which were brought up in buses and then assembled in places 
near our new front, to be flung against our advanced lines, 
had a dreadful time, and must have suffered great losses. 
After the rain of the night and the mist of the morning, 
the weather cleared in time for our airmen to go on recon- 
noitring, as I saw them in swarms in yesterday's sky, and 
they were quick to report the massing of the enemy. Our 
guns were quick to fire at these human targets. These 
counter-attacks developed several times against the Eng- 
lish and Highland troops, who were fighting across the 
Zonnebeke-Langemarck road, north-west of the Graven- 
stafel and Abraham Heights, at a place called the Schrei- 



342- FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

boom, north of Langemarck. Some of the Rifle Brigade 
and King's Royal Rifles, with other hght-infantry troops, 
failed at first to get a certain trench, and very hard fight- 
ing took place during the day in a pocket with desperate 
courage. At the same time the Highlanders south of them 
were fighting very hard also round about the blockhouses 
by Rose House, Pheasant Farm, and Quebec Farm beyond 
the Pilkem Ridge, into which I looked a week or two ago, 
when things were quiet on the line. The Highlanders were 
driven back for a while, and the enemy's counter-attacks 
were made in strong force at about ten o'clock in the morn- 
ing, and several times later. But they were broken up each 
time by the rifle-fire of the Scottish troops, and by our field- 
batteries. 

Large numbers of the enemy were killed here in our first 
attack and afterwards. Besides the artillery, a heavy bom- 
bardment was made before the men went out by trench- 
mortars, which raked a small area of shell-holes so thor- 
oughly that the German snipers in them were destroyed, 
and an important trench was taken by the Scots with hardly 
any casualties. A good deal more than 100,000 rounds of 
shells must have gone over from the guns before the battle, 
and afterwards the German storm troops who tried to 
recover the ground were smothered with fire. Six times 
they came on with much determination, and six times their 
waves were broken up. Some London Territorials had to 
repel part of the assaulting waves, after a gallant struggle 
for their objectives, and one young officer among them 
earned special -honour by gathering a company of men 
together and leading them against the advancing enemy, 
whom they scattered with bombs and rifles. 

Most of the Germans here in this district round Wurst 
Farm, east of Winnipeg, were men of the 36th and 208th 
Divisions, and were a mixture of Prussians and Poles, who 
seem to have been stout-hearted fellows. Their local re- 
serves were quickly exhausted, and in the afternoon, when 
they threw in further reserves, these were broken up in 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 343 

the same way. A frightful fate met a German division 
which was brought up in the afternoon near Roulers to be 
hurled against the Londoners and Highlanders. Our guns 
broke up their columns, and when they rallied and re- 
formed, broke them again. Our aeroplanes flew low over 
them, strafing them with machine-gun fire, and at inter- 
vals gas clouded about them, so that they had to put on 
their masks, if they had time to put them on before they 
fell, and marched blindly forward to another doom, for 
some of those who came within range were shot down by 
the London men, little fellows, some of them, with the 
Cockney accent which makes me homesick for the Fulham 
Road when I hear it along the roads of Flanders, but with 
big, brave hearts. Three of the German battalions de- 
ployed and drove against the Highlanders at Delva Farm 
and Rose House, and fought so hard that they could only 
be driven back when the Highlanders rallied, and at eight 
o'clock in the evening swept them out and away. Strong 
counter-attacks were made between six and seven in the 
evening in the neighbourhood of Hill 37 and the country 
round Bremen Redoubt, against the King's Liverpools, 
where the South-African Scots held their line. 

There were a great many blockhouses in this district, 
some of them damaged and some still intact, and in those 
undamaged forts little parties of men, who fired their 
machine-guns to the last moment before death or surrender. 
Hill 37 was a hard place to attack, as the Irish found it, 
and here Lancashire men fought their way up and round 
in spite of the waves of machine-gun bullets that swept the 
ground about them. The Bremen Redoubt, which had been 
so costly to the Irishmen on July 31, was carried by the 
South-Africans in a fine assault, while Scottish troops were 
gaining other strong points and drawing tight nets round 
any blockhouse from which came any fire. Out of these 
places, in all that part of the line, many prisoners were 
taken, and they made their way down anxiously through 
their own shell-fire, which was barraging these fields. A 



844. FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

great party of Germans, white-faced and afraid, were found 
in the long galleries running out of a fortified place called 
Schuler Farm. 

South of all this the Australians were fighting in the 
centre of yesterday's great attack where the ground rises 
to the foul heights of Polygon Wood. The Australian lads 
were in their most perfect form. They had had some rest 
since the hard, bad days at Bullecourt and in the dreadful 
valley of Noreuil, where I went to see them outside the 
Queant-Drocourt line. Since then I had seen them in 
the harvest-fields of France, in the market squares of Flem- 
ish towns, along the dusty roads which lead up to the 
Front. Always I felt it good to see those easy-going fel- 
lows in their flap hats, so lithe, so clean-cut, so fresh. It 
was an honour to get a salute from them now and then, 
for they are not great at that sort of thing, and one could 
see with half an eye that they have not lost any of their 
quality since some of them fought their great epic at Helles 
and Suvla Bay, and afterwards at Pozieres gained and held 
their ground under months of great shell-fire, and then 
at Bullecourt fought with the grim endurance of men who 
will not yield to any kind of hammering if their pride 
is in the job. They are boys, many of them, and simple- 
looking fellows who were not cut to the model of barrack- 
room soldiers. They have a wildish gipsy look when one 
sees them camped in the fields, and free-and-easy manners 
in the village estaminets. When I heard they were going 
to attack Polygon Wood I knew that we should get it, if 
human courage' could have the say, for the Australians are 
not easily denied if they set their mind on a thing, and for 
all their boyishness — though they have middle-aged fellows 
among them too — they have a grim passion in them at such 
times. Yet they are free-and-easy always, even on the bat- 
tlefield, and a bit impatient of checks and restraints. Know- 
ing them, and the heart and soul of them, one of their 
commanding officers arranged a method of preventing them 
from getting bored with the long strain of a two hours' 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 345 

wait, which was ordered when they should have gained 
their first objective. He sent up to them by the carrying 
parties bundles of the previous day's papers, all the picture 
papers especially, and large quantities of cigarettes. The 
idea worked beautifully, and it was the strangest thing 
that has happened in any great battle. The AustraHan 
lads got at the papers, and on the ground which they had 
just captured spread them out and studied the news of 
the day and smoked their cigarettes with quiet enjoyment, 
while ahead of them rolled a stupendous barrage, with thou- 
sands of heavy shells that came screaming over their heads 
from our guns behind them, answered by other shells that 
came the other way, and burst farther back on the battle- 
field. So they were seen by one of our airmen, who was 
surprised by what he saw. 

The going had been pretty bad before then, as I was 
told to-day by some of the men whom I met slightly 
wounded along the Menin road. The enemy seemed to 
smell danger in the night and put over a heavy barrage just 
before the attack started. It was on the tail of the Aus- 
tralians, and might have demoralized them if they had not 
been so high in heart. They got away in good order, and 
kept going to keep pace with the travelling storm of shells 
which broke before them. One queer thing happened near 
Clapham Junction. The enemy had apparently planned a 
raid with "flammenwerfer," or flame-jets as we call these 
devilish engines, at the very time of the attack, and they 
were met by the Australian shock of assault, and fell be- 
fore it. While some of the Australians worked round Glen- 
corse Copse and Nonne Boschen or Nuns' Wood, others 
fought up by Westhoek across the Hannebeek towards the 
post called by a curious coincidence Anzac Corner. After 
heavy fighting for a little while at one of the blockhouses 
the Australian flag was planted at Anzac Corner and 
waves there still. In Nonne Boschen the ground was 
marshy and encumbered with fallen trees, but the boys 
struggled through somehow, and then started for the 



346 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Polygon Wood, where there is no wood, as there seldom 
is in these places when our artillery has done its work, 
but only some blasted trunks and stakes. In Glencorse 
Wood and round about it there were a good many Germans, 
and they fought hard. Fifty of them were killed in hand- 
to-hand fighting, or fighting at close quarters, and a block- 
house on the north-west of the wood, where the garrison 
would not surrender, but kept his machine-guns going, was 
taken by a bombing attack. So after a two hours' wait at 
the end of the first lap the Australians flung away their 
cigarettes and the assaulting waves passed on to the ridge 
of Polygon Wood. They could not take all the line they 
had been asked to take in the first attempt, and were checked 
on the right by machine-gun fire. So they dug in on a 
crescent, which had its right ear somewhere by Carlisle 
Farm to the north of Black Watch Corner, until supports 
came up to make good their losses on the way, and they 
were able to go forward and straighten out. After that 
the counter-attacks began. All of them were broken up 
by artillery-fire, and when one of the German divisions was 
flung in, the only men who reached our lines were those 
who tried to escape from the barrage which our guns put 
over their assembly position. I should like to give a fuller 
history than I did yesterday about the taking of Inverness 
Copse and the bogs of the Dumbarton Lakes, and the tan- 
gled ground of Shrewsbury Forest, but I have no time, 
as the wires wait, except to pay a tribute to the men who 
fought there over most difficult country, crowded with 
blockhouses, and under severe fire from the enemy's guns. 
Men from Surrey and Kent, from the Midlands, from 
Wales, from the North, the battalions of the 8th and 14th 
Divisions, all fought and won with equal courage and 
success. 

September 23 
The enthusiasm of the troops who fought in Thursday's 
battle of the Menin road is good enough proof that they 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 347 

achieved success that morning without those great losses 
which take the heart out of victory. All the men I have 
seen are convinced that the enemy's losses are heavy. Not 
so much in the actual attack, where he held his blockhouse 
system with small garrisons, as afterwards, when he tried 
to counter-attack. 

I have already put on record some of the attempts he 
made to regain ground on the afternoon of the battle. Yes- 
terday and to-day he has continued his efforts with even 
more disastrous results to his unhappy troops. About mid- 
day yesterday a German regiment was sent up in motor- 
omnibuses to a point behind the enemy's lines to make a new 
assault upon our positions in Polygon Wood. The three 
battalions then took to the road, and were seen very quickly 
by our observers. The artillery made that road a way of 
fire, and the German soldiers were caught in it and dis- 
persed. Odd companies of them worked their way forward 
by other tracks, but lost themselves in the chaos of shell- 
craters, where other heavy shells burst among them. They 
were no longer battalions or companies, but a terror-stricken 
collection of individual soldiers, taking cover in holes and 
without guidance or command. An officer collected fifty 
of them and led them back to reorganize. He had no notion 
of what had happened to the rest of the regiment, except 
that it was broken and ineffective, in this wild turmoil of 
crater earth. He went forward again on reconnaissance, 
and walked into a body of Australians, who took him 
prisoner. 

So it happened with another column at Zandvoorde. One 
of our aerial observers watched the long trail of men 
marching up the road and sent a message to the guns. They 
were the heavy guns which found the target with 9-2 shells 
and with twelve-inchers, which are monstrous and annihi- 
lating. Down there at Zandvoorde it must have been hell. 
We can only guess how many men were blown to pieces, and 
it is not a picture on which the imagination should care 
to linger. It was a bloody shambles. 



MS FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Along the Menin road later in the day came another long 
column of marching men. They were men of the Sixteenth 
Bavarian Division, who had been sent up in urgent haste 
without knowledge of the ground, without maps, and with 
officers who seem to have had no definite instructions ex- 
cept to fling their men in an attack somehow and anyhow. 
Over their heads in the darkness under the stars flew a 
British aeroplane with a bomb of the heaviest kind. When 
our airman saw these hostile troops advancing, flying low 
like a great black bat he dropped his frightful thing on the 
head of the column. It burst with a deafening roar and 
scattered the leading company. Flying in the same sky- 
space as the big aeroplane was a number of other night 
raiders of ours. They also flew low above the marching 
troops, and all down the road dropped their explosives. 
Our guns added their help, and they fired many rounds 
down the Menin road, bracketing the ditches. It is a dread- 
ful thing to walk along a road which is being "bracketed," 
and with those birds of prey above them the Bavarians 
must have suffered the worst kind of horror. They did 
not get near to our lines with any counter-attack. 

None of these counter-attacks has reached our lines near 
Polygon Ridge, which is the ground most wanted by the 
enemy, and the nearest seems to have been yesterday after- 
noon, when some of the Australian boys with whom I talked 
to-day saw the movement of men and the glint of bayonets 
in a little wood on an opposite spur. They saw the move- 
ment of men for a minute or two, and after that a fury 
of shells which fell into the wood and filled it with flame 
and smoke. 

"I don't know how a mortal man could have lived 
through that," said one of these lads. "If any Fritz got out 
of that without being cracked he must have had the luck 
of Old Harry." 

There were many of these Australian boys among whom 
I went to-day before they had cleaned themselves of the 
dirt of battle, and while they were still on fire with the 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS S49 

emotion of their amazing adventure. Some of them had 
escaped only by enormous luck. I talked with one stretcher- 
bearer, a fine, big, bullet-headed fellow with an unshaven 
chin and a merry smile, who was astounded to find him- 
self alive. He had spent the day and night bandaging 
wounded, and, with his mates, carrying them down to the 
dressing-station, a mile and more back. All the time he 
walked and worked with bursting shells about him. They 
knocked out several of his mates, but left him untouched. 
They killed two or three of the wounded on his stretchers 
going down, but did not scratch him. They blew up dug- 
outs just as he had gone out of them, and trenches through 
which he made his way. He was buried in earth flung 
up by heavy shells, and he fell many times into deep craters, 
and men dropped all round him, but to-day he still had a 
whole skin and a queer, lingering smile, in which there is 
a look of wonderment because of his escape. 

An Australian officer, who was through the Dardanelles 
and the Somme and Bullecourt, a slim, small-sized Aus- 
tralian, with a delicate, clean-cut face, thoughtful and grave, 
with a fine light in his eyes, was helping a wounded lad on 
to a stretcher when a shell came over his head, killed the 
boy, but left the officer unscathed. It was this officer, this 
slight, delicate-looking man, who captured, with three lads, 
sixty men and a German battalion staff in their headquarter 
dug-outs below Polygon Wood. 

"Where is your revolver?" he said to the captain. The 
German hesitated, and said : "You will shoot me if I fetch 
it." "I will shoot you if you don't," said the Httle Aus- 
tralian. And he meant what he said, as I could see by the 
set of his lips when he told me the tale. But the German 
captain handed over his revolver quietly, and his maps, 
which were very useful. 

It was a wonderful scene to-day among all these Aus- 
tralian lads, who had just been relieved and were talking 
over the scenes of yesterday's history in small groups while 
they scraped off the mud and shaved before bits of broken 



S50 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

mirror, and polished up German rifles and machine-guns 
and handled their souvenirs, found in the dug-outs and 
blockhouses. Many of them were stripped to the waist, 
some of them wore German caps, some of them slept like 
drugged men in spite of all the noise about them. After 
taking the first objective they had to wait for two hours 
before they went on, and there were queer scenes about 
the blockhouses and in the felled woods. They had found 
the German rations, and besides the sausages and bread 
and gallons of cold cofTee in petrol-tins, which the boys 
shared among themselves, quantities of long, fat, and ex- 
cellent cigars. Hundreds of Australians smoked these 
cigars while they waited for the barrage to lift, and when 
they went on again hundreds of them were still puffing them 
as they trudged on to Polygon Wood. They had a good 
day. I have met some of them, who said they enjoyed 
it, and would not have missed it for worlds. The excite- 
ment of it all kept them going. The battlefield was a wild 
pandemonium of men, and the imagination of people who 
have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with 
lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with 
groups fighting and falling round blockhouses while others 
wer^ eating German sausages and joking in captured em- 
placements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men back under 
heavy shell-fire and German prisoners dodging their own 
barrage-fire on their way to our lines. An Australian doc- 
tor had his arm smashed, but stayed among the boys, re- 
gardless of his own hurt. A V.C. officer of the Dardanelles 
was killed as'he went back wounded on a stretcher. Ger- 
man wounded lay crying for help, and our men rescued 
them. So about Glencorse Wood and Polygon Wood hu- 
map agony and the wild spirits of Australian youth, death, 
and the vitality of boyhood in the passion of a great adven- 
ture were queerly mixed, and one side of this picture of war 
would be hopelessly untrue if it left out the other side. 

One enthusiasm of the Australians was about the Eng- 
lish soldiers who fought on their right, the Yorkshire boys 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 351 

and others who went through Inverness Copse. Again 
and again yesterday I heard them loud in praise of the 
Tommies. 

"By gosh, they'll do for me ! They went ahead in grand 
style. They couldn't be stopped anyhow, though they came 
up against a dumed lot of machine-gun fire. They were 
just fine." 

Far north of all this, above the Zonnebeke, were the 
Londoners of the 58th Division and the Highlanders of 
the 51st Division, and, as I have already written in pre- 
vious messages, they had severe fighting and had to bear 
the brunt of great counter-attacks. The ground in front of 
the London Territorials was bad and difficult — bad because 
it was intersected with swamps and cut up by weeks of 
shell-fire, and horribly difficult because of a ridge rising 
up on the left to the German strong point of Wurst Farm. 

The London boys swung left in order to attack Wurst 
Farm, and, avoiding a frontal assault, worked left-handed 
all the time till they reached the ridge, and then rushed 
the blockhouse from the rear. The garrison was surprised 
and caught. They fought desperately, but the Londoners 
overpowered them. The surviving Germans complained 
bitterly, and said it was impossible to use their machine- 
guns on every side at once. "It is not a fair way of fight- 
ing," said a German officer, and the Londoners laughed 
and said, "Not half !" and "I don't think !" and other iron- 
ical words. 

In a big dressing-station up there they captured two doc- 
tors and sixty men, of whom many were wounded. The 
German doctors said, "Have you any wounded we can 
help? We are not fighting men." And they made them- 
selves useful, and were good fellows. 

Down in the valley the Londoners came face to face 
with a party of Germans who showed fight, but the Lon- 
doners — little fellows some of them — walked through them 
and over dead bodies who had fallen before their rifle-fire. 
There was a lot of musketry both then and afterwards when 



352 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the enemy counter-attacked, and they fired like sharp- 
shooters. Down below them and almost behind them the 
line dropped away to the fort of Schuler Farm, where the 
enemy still held out. "There are a lot of Boches down 
there," said an officer on the brigade staff of the London 
Territorials. "No," said the brigade major, and then: 
"Yes, and, by the Lord, there's a German officer staring at 
me. The blighter is telling one of his men to take a pot 
at me. See!" The brigade major ducked down his head 
as a bullet flattened against the blockhouse wall. 

It was an awkward situation for the Londoners, but 
they formed a defensive flank and sent some lads to help 
the troops who were attacking the position. "Domine 
dirige nos" is the London motto, and there were many Lon- 
don boys who had it in their hearts that day, and said with 
the dear old Cockney accent, "Gord 'elp us." That was 
when the German counter-attacks developed, but were 
smashed by gun-fire. 

In all this fighting, as far as I can find, the Highland 
Territorials of the 51st Division upon the left had the blood- 
iest fighting. They gained their ground with difficulty, 
because a battalion of the Royal Scots was badly held up 
by wire and bogs and machine-gun fire at a stream called 
the Lekkerbolerbeek. They had to fall back, reorganize, 
and attack again, which they did with splendid gallantry, 
and held their ground only by most grim endurance, be- 
cause the enemy counter-attacked them violently all day 
long after the objectives had been gained. 

The enemy's. losses were certainly appalling to him. Offi- 
cers in this fighting, who have been through many of our 
great battles, tell me that they have never seen before 
so many dead as lie upon this ground. In one section of 
Pheasant Trench a hundred yards long there are nearly a 
hundred dead. Before the attack our barrage rolled for- 
ward slowly, like a devouring fire. Instantly all along the 
German line green lights rose as S O S signals, but as the 
barrage swept on, followed by the Scots, the lights went 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 353 

out. They rose again from the farther lines, and then those 
ceased as the shells reached them. Only in the blockhouses 
and the dug-outs down by the Lekkerbolerbeek were any 
Germans left alive. 

The blockhouses were dealt with by small parties of 
Highlanders, who had been in training to meet them, and 
went like wolves about them, firing their machine-guns and 
rifles through the loopholes if the garrisons would not come 
out. So they swept on to their final goal, which was at 
Rose House and the cemetery beyond Pheasant Farm. 
These men had some terrible hours to face. By ill-luck 
their left flank was utterly exposed, and hostile aeroplanes, 
flying very low, saw this and flew back with the news. The 
enemy was already developing a series of counter-attacks 
by his "Stosstruppen," or storm troops, of the 234th Divi- 
sion, which from three o'clock in the afternoon till seven 
o'clock that evening made repeated thrusts against the High- 
landers' front, and the heaviest weight of two and a half 
battalions was sent forward against this flank. It was pre- 
ceded by the heaviest German barrage ever seen by these 
Scots, who have had many experiences of barrage-fire. Offi- 
cers watching from a little distance were horrified by that 
monstrous belt of fire, and the garrison of Gordons seemed 
lost to them for ever. It was not so bad as that. Eventu- 
ally this flank fell back from Rose House to Pheasant Farm . 
Cemetery and other ground, where they were rallied by a 
battalion commander, one of the youngest men of his rank 
in the British Army, who supplied them with fresh am- 
munition and directed them to hold up the German infantry 
advancing under cover of their bombardment. In spite of 
their losses our men fought their way back and regained 
part of the ground by desperate valour. Our guns wiped 
out the other counter-attacks one by one, inflicting fright- 
ful losses on the enemy. They were caught most horribly 
as they came along the road. Thirty machine-guns played 
a barrage-fire on his lines where German soldiers tried to 
escape across the shell-craters. The Highlanders used their 



S54 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

rifles effectively, one man firing over 500 rounds. And a 
gun was brought into action from a Tank which had come 
up as far as an advanced blockhouse, in spite of the boggy- 
ground. 

There was great slaughter among the enemy that day. 
Since then the slaughter has gone on, for his counter-attacks 
]:ave not ceased. His guns have been very active, bombard- 
ing parts of our line intensely, and in the air his scouts 
and raiders have been flying over our lines in the endeavour 
to observe and destroy our troops and batteries, flying low 
with great audacity, and using machine-guns as well as 
bombs. But we hold all the important ground gained last 
Thursday. 

16 

The Way to Passchendaele 

September 26 
During the past forty-eight hours there has been hard and 
prolonged fighting north and south of the Menin road, and 
in spite of formidable counter-attacks by the enemy which 
began early yesterday morning and still continue, our troops 
have made a successful advance in the neighbourhood of 
Zonnebeke and southward beyond the Polygon Wood race- 
course, which now belongs to the Australians. 

It is south of that, bv Cameron House and the rivulet 
called the Reutelbeek, that the enemy's pressure has been 
greatest, and where the battalions of the 33rd and 39th 
Divisions on the right of the Australians, including the 
Queen's, have had the hardest time imder incessant fire 
and attack since dawn yesterday, but on their right Sher- 
wood Foresters and Rifle Brigade men, also severely tried, 
have swept across the Tower Hamlets Ridge in the direc- 
tion of Gheluvelt. 

It was fully expected that any new endeavour of ours to 
advance beyond the ground gained in the battle of Septem- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 355 

ber 20 would be met by the fiercest opposition. The cap- 
ture of Polygon Wood and Westhoek seriously lessened the 
value of Passchendaele Ridge, which strikes northward 
and forms the enemy's great defensive barrier, and it was 
certain that in spite of the heavy losses he has already 
suffered in trying to get back that high ground above In- 
verness Copse he would bring up all his available reserves 
to hinder our further progress at all costs. 

For two days before yesterday he made no sign of move- 
ment in his lines, and was kept quiet by the breakdown of 
all his previous counter-attacks, which our men repulsed 
with most bloody losses to the enemy, so that their divi- 
sions were shattered and demoralized. The German Com- 
mand used that time to drag the broken units out of the 
line and to replace them or hurry up to their support the 
reserves who had been waiting in the rest areas behind. 
These men were rushed up by motor-omnibus and rail- 
ways to points where it was necessary to take to the roads 
and march to the assembly positions ready for immediate 
counter-attacks. Those were in the Zandvoorde and 
Kruiseik neighbourhood, south-east of Gheluvelt, ready 
to strike up to the Tower Hamlets Ridge while others could 
be assembled behind the Passchendaele Ridge. 

No doubt our attack for this morning did not leave out 
of account the strength of resistance likely to be offered. 
The enemy showed signs of desperate anxiety to check us 
on the Polygon Wood line, and the ground going south of 
it to the Cheluvelt Spur, and he made a great effort by 
massed artillery to smash up the organization behind our 
lines, and by a series of thrusts to break our front. On 
Monday afternoon, increasing to great intensity yesterday, 
he flung down his barrage-fire in Glencorse Wood and In- 
verness Copse, fired large numbers of heavy long-range 
shells over Westhoek Ridge, Observatory Ridge, Hooge, 
and other old spots of ill-fame, and concentrated most 
fiercely on the ground about Cameron House, Black WatcK 
Corner, and the Tower Hamlets. 



356 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

At six o'clock yesterday morning, supported by this ter- 
rific fire, he launched his first attack on the Surreys, Scot- 
tish Rifles, Middlesex Regiment, and other troops around 
the Tower Hamlets, and owing to their losses they were 
obliged to fall back some little way in order to reorganize 
for an assault to recapture their position. These fought 
through some awful hours, and several of their units did 
heroic things to safeguard their lines, which for a time 
were threatened. 

While they were fighting in this way the 4th and 5th 
Australians, on the high ground this side of Polygon Wood 
racecourse and the mound which is called the Butte, also 
had to repel some fierce attacks which opened on them 
shortly after eight o'clock in the morning. The enemy 
was unable to pierce their line, and fell back from this 
first attempt with great losses in dead and wounded. It 
was followed by a second thrust at midday and met the 
same fate. At two o'clock in the afternoon the Austra- 
lians sent some of their men to help the Surreys and the 
English troops on their right, who were passing through 
a greater ordeal owing to the storm of fire over them and 
the continued pressure of the enemy's storm troops, who 
were persistent through the afternoon in spite of the trails 
of dead left in their tracks. It was a serious anxiety on 
the eve of a new battle, but it failed to frustrate our at- 
tack. All the area through which the enemy was trying 
to bring up his troops was made hideous by artillery-fire 
and the work of the Royal Flying Corps. 

It was a cleaf moonlight night, with hardly a breath of 
air blowing, and all the countryside was made visible by 
the moon's rays, which silvered the roofs of all the villages 
and made every road like a white tape. Our planes went 
out over the enemy's lines laden with bombs, and patrolled 
up and down the tracks and made some thirty attacks 
upon the German transport and his marching columns. 
All his lines of approach were kept under continual fire 
by our guns of heavy calibre, and for miles around shells 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 357 

swept the points which marching men would have to pass, 
so that their way was helHsh. Our aircraft went out and 
flew very low, and dropped bombs wherever they saw men 
moving through the luminous mists of the night. Behind 
our own lines air patrols guarded the countryside. They 
carried lights, and as they flew in the starlit sky they them- 
selves looked like shooting stars until they dropped low, 
when their planes were diaphanous as butterfly's wings in 
sunlight. On the battlefield there was no unusual gun-fire 
for several hours after dark. Guns on both sides kept up 
the usual night bombardment in slow sullen strokes, but 
at least on the Australian front it was not until about 4.45 
in the morning that the enemy opened a heavy barrage in 
Glencorse Wood. The Australian troops yvere already 
massed beyond that ground for the attack which was short- 
ly due. On the north, up by Wurst Farm, on the lower 
slopes of the Gravenstafel, our London Territorials were 
also waiting to go ''over the bags," as they call it. Against 
them the German guns put over a heavy barrage, but that 
line of explosives failed tc stop or check the assault. 

It was almost dark when our London lads went forward 
through a thick ground mist, which was wet and clammy 
about them. Our artillery had opened before them the 
same monstrous line of barrage-fire which they had fol- 
lowed on the 20th, and they went after it at a slow trudge, 
which gave them time to avoid shell-craters and get over 
difficult ground without lagging behind that protecting 
storm. That violence of fire was as deadly and terrifying 
this morning as on that other day. Through the mist our 
men saw the Germans running and falling, and many of 
them did not stay in the blockhouses, though it was al- 
most certain death to come out into the open before the 
barrage passed. There were dead men in many shell- 
craters before our men reached them, and others after- 
wards, as they passed through clumps of ruin which had 
once been hamlets and farms. There was such a mess of 
brickwork and masonry at Aviatik Farm, where Germans 



858 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

hiding in concrete walls fired machine-guns and rifles for 
a time until the British troops closed on them. 

Something like 150 prisoners were taken in this section 
of the attack, and one of them was a queer bird who be- 
longed to the sea. That is to say, he had been a sailor 
on the Dresden and was in the battle of Falkland Island 
and off Coronel, where he was picked up by a Swedish 
boat and taken back to Germany. To his disgust he was 
put in the loth Ersatz Division, and now, after his soldier 
life, wants to work in a British shipyard. He was sur- 
prised at the food given to him, and thought it was a bribe 
to get information from him, believing that England is 
agonizing with hunger. 

About a hundred and fifty prisoners were taken also, 
by the troops on the right of this section, belonging mostly 
to the 23rd Reserve Division, with some of the 3rd Guards. 
Our men who attacked in the direction of Zonnebeke vil- 
lage were Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, East Yorks, Royal 
Scots, Gordons, and King's Own, and they had some stiff 
fighting on the way to the Windmill Cabaret and Hill 
Forty, which seems to be the key to the position. Here 
they came against some of the blockhouses at Toronto 
Farm and Van Isackere Farm, but did not meet great 
trouble there. Some of them had been so badly knocked 
by shell-fire that the garrisons inside were killed by con- 
cussion, and from others men came out to surrender as 
soon as our men were near them. Near the village of 
Zonnebeke the fight was more serious against the Royal 
Scots and East Yorks, and the enemy's gun-fire, which had 
not been very heavy on the other ground of attack, smashed 
along the line of the railway embankment. 

The Australian advance across the racecourse of Poly- 
gon Wood and northward across the spur to below Zonne- 
beke Chateau was steady and successful. There was a 
regular chain of blockhouses on the way, but there again 
the old black magic of the pill-box failed. The men ral- 
lied inside them, many of them being Poles of the 49th 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 359 

Regiment, who hate the Prussians in a fierce way and ask 
us to kill as many as possible for their sake. Most of 
them were quick and glad to surrender. A platoon of 
them were taken in some wooden dug-outs below the high 
mound of Polygon Wood, that old Butte which is supposed 
to be the burial-place of a prehistoric chief, though by 
the Australians it is believed to be the observation-post of 
Sir Douglas Haig in 19 14. 

The enemy's gun-fire was heavy over part of the grouhd, 
and there was a nest of machine-guns along a road which 
gave some trouble, but in the main attack the losses of 
the Australians were not heavy up to the time they gained 
the last objective. It was our aircraft which brought back 
the first news of the Anzacs on the racecourse in Polygon 
Wood, and later they had reached the farthest goal, where 
prisoners were surrendering freely. On the left of their 
front the Australians were quite satisfied with their posi- 
tion. On the right they had great anxiety because of the 
check to the troops below them. At one time it was found 
advisable for the Australians to swing back their flank a 
little in order to avoid its exposure. But the Australians 
are full of confidence and are sure that they can handle 
any counter-attack which may be launched against them. 
It has been a hard day for all our men, especially for those 
who bore the brunt of the enemy's fire, and I believe will 
be counted as one of the biggest days of fighting in this 
war. Its decision is of vital importance to the enemy and 
to ourselves, and so far it is in our favour. 



17 
The Battle of Polygon Wood 

September 2^ 
The battle which began yesterday morning, after a whole 
day of counter-attacking by the enemy, in great numbers 



360 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and by great gun-fire, lasted until nightfall, and, as I told 
yesterday, did not pass without anxious hours for those 
in command, and trying hours for some of our fighting 
men. 




From the left above Zonnebeke down to the Australian 
front on the heights of the Polygon Wood Racecourse the 
advance was made with fair ease through the blockhouse 
system and without severe losses, as they are reckoned 
in modern warfare, in spite of difficult bits of ground and 
the usual snags, as our men call them, in the- way of unex- 
pected machine-gun fire, odd bits of trench to which small 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 361 

groups of Germans clung stubbornly, dirty swamps which 
some of our men could not cross quickly enough to keep 
up with the barrage, and danger zones upon which the 
enemy heaped his explosives. 

There were incidents enough for individual men to be 
remembered for a lifetime, hairbreadth escapes, tight cor- 
ners in which men died after acts of fine heroism, and 
strong points like Hill 40, on the left of the ruins of Zonne- 
beke, around which some of our troops struggled with for- 
tune. 

Apart from local vicissitudes here and there during these 
first hours of the battle it became clear by midday, or 
before, that from the extreme left of the attack down to 
the vicinity of Cameron House, on the right of the Austra- 
lians, the general success of the day was good. The criti- 
cal situation was on the right of the 4th and 5th Austra- 
lians, and involving their right because of the enemy's vio- 
lent pressure on British troops there during the previous 
day, and again when our new attack started, so that their 
line had been somewhat forced back and the Australian 
right flank was exposed. 

Hour after hour reports coming from this part of the 
field were read with some anxiety when it was known how 
heavily some of our battalions were engaged. This men- 
ace to our right wing was averted by the courage of men 
of the Middlesex and Surrey Regiments of the 33rd Divi- 
sion, with Argylls and Sutherlands and Scottish Rifles, and 
by the quick, skilful, and generous help of the Australian" 
troops on their left. It is an episode of the battle which 
will one day be an historic memory when all the details 
are told. I can only tell them briefly and in outline. 

After terrific shelling, on Tuesday last, the enemy 
launched an attack at six o'clock against our line by Carlisle 
Farm and Black Watch Corner, south of Polygon Wood, 
and forced some of our English troops to fall back towards 
Lone House and the dirty little swamp of the Reutelbeek. 
These boys of Middlesex and Surrey suffered severely. 



362 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

For some time it was all they could do to hold out, and 
the enemy was still pressing, A body of Scottish Rifles 
was sent up to support them, and by a most brave counter- 
thrust under great gun-fire restored part of the line, so 
that it was strong enough to keep back any advancing wave 
of Germans by rifle and machine-gun fire. 

Another body of men, the Argyll and Sutherland High- 
landers, held out on exposed ground, isolated from the main 
line, and threatened with being cut off by the enemy's 
assault troops. Sir Douglas Haig has mentioned them spe- 
cially in his message yesterday, and they deserve great 
honour for the heroic way in which they held on to this 
ground for many hours that day and night under harassing 
fire from coal-boxes, or 5'9's, which threatened to wipe 
out their whole strength. Yesterday they had strength 
and spirit left to renew the attack, and to make another 
attempt to get back the lost ground into which the enemy 
had driven a wedge. 

At the same time the Australians had realized the dan- 
gerous situation which exposed their right flank, and they 
directed a body of their own troops to strike southward 
in order to thrust back the German outposts. Those Aus- 
tralian troops shared the peril of their comrades on the 
right, and withstood the same tornado of shelling which 
was flung over all the ground here; but in spite of heroic 
sacrifice did not at first wholly relieve the position of the 
Australian right, which remained exposed. After the great 
attack by the Anzacs in the morning their line was thrust 
right out beybnd Cameron House, but the English and 
Scottish troops of the 33rd Division, who had also gone 
forward in the new attack south of them, were again met 
by a most deadly barrage-fire and checked at a critical time. 
I was with some of the Australians yesterday when all 
this was happening, and when there was cause for worry. 
They were unruflled, and did not lose confidence for a mo- 
ment. 

"Give us two hours," said one of them who had a right 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 363 

to speak, "and we will make everything as sound as a bell." 
In those two hours they drew back their flank to get into 
line on a curve going back towards Lone House, and estab- 
lished defensive posts which would hold off any attack likely 
to be launched against them. 

"It is hard luck on the English boys down there," said 
the Australians, "but they have had a bad gruelling, and 
they will come along in spite of it. There is not an Austra- 
lian in France who doesn't know how the Tommy-Boys 
fought on the 20th, and that will do for us." 

The "Tommy-Boys," as the Australians call them, fought 
as they have fought in three years of great battles, and in 
spite of the ordeal through which they had passed — and 
it was not a light one — they saved the situation on that 
ground below Polygon Wood, and made it too dangerous 
and too costly for the enemy to stay. Early this morning 
the survivors of the Germans who had thrust a wedge be- 
tween our lines past Cameron House crawled out again and 
our line was straightened. 

How the Australians established themselves on Polygon 
Wood Racecourse and beyond the big mound called the 
Butte I told in my message yesterday. Farther north the 
Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, Royal Scots, Gordons, and 
King's Own of the 59th and 3rd Divisions had attacked 
north of the Ypres-Roulers railway, running at right 
angles to the Langemarck-Zonnebeke road. On that road, 
barring the way, was the station of Zonnebeke, now a mass 
of wreckage, fortified with machine-gun redoubts, and 
farther south the ruins of Zonnebeke church and village. 
Across the road was the Windmill Cabarei:, an old inn 
which has been blown off the map on the high ground of 
Hill 40, which rises gradually to a hump a hundred yards 
or so north of the station. It was bad ground to attack, 
and strewn with little blockhouses of the new type, though 
they are still called pill-boxes after an older and smaller 
type. The blockhouses did not give much trouble. Our 
new form of barrage, the most frightful combination of 



864 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

high explosives and shrapnel that has yet appeared in war, 
rolled backwards and forwards about them/ so that the 
garrisons huddled inside until our men nipped behind them 
and thrust rifles or bombs through the machine-gun loop- 
holes, if they had not previously escaped to shell-craters 
around where they might have more chance of escape. 

And here I might say in passing that the enemy has 
already modified his methods of holding the blockhouses, 
and while only a few men remain inside, distributes the 
rest of the garrison in shell-holes on either side, with their 
machine-guns in the organized craters. Some of them 
were found by our men, and though many of them had 
been killed by our gun-fire, others remained shooting and 
sniping until they were routed out. 

The worst part of the ground on this line of attack 
was around a blockhouse called Bostin Farm, where there 
was a dismal, stinking swamp so impassable that the Royal 
Scots, Scottish Fusiliers, and East Yorks of the 3rd Divi- 
sion who tried to make their way through it lost touch with 
the barrage, which rolled ahead of them, and had to work 
round and up towards Hill 40. Here they came under ma- 
chine-gun fire, and although some men forced their way 
up the slope of the knoll on which the Windmill Cabaret 
stood, they did not quite reach the crest. 

Meanwhile men of the Gordons, Suffolks, and Welsh 
Fusiliers were attacking round about Zonnebeke, where the 
ground was swept by machine-gun bullets, and seized the 
ruin of the church and the outskirts of the station yard. 
There was he'avy shelling from the enemy all day, which 
caused the line to fall back a little, and at six o'clock yes- 
terday evening the enemy launched two counter-attacks 
from Zonnebeke and another around Hill 40. Half an 
hour later the Royal Scots and Royal Scottish Fusiliers 
moved forward to thrust the enemy back, and at exactly 
the same time another counter-attack of his advanced in 
their direction. Each body of men were protected by bar- 
rage-lines of heavy shell-fire, and our shells and the Ger- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS S65 

man shells mingled and burst together in a wide belt of 
fury, and sometimes neither side could cross it. 

Farther north South Midland men did well. They ad- 
vanced from Zevenkote on the right and Schuler Farm 
on the left to Van Isackere Farm and Dochy Farm and 
other blockhouses on each side of the high road between 
Langemarck and Zonnebeke with hardly a check. They 
found many of the blockhouses badly damaged after the 
heavy fire that had been poured on each one of them, and 
if they were not damaged the men inside were so nerve- 
shaken that they were eager to surrender. Apparently they 
had not expected the attack to follow the hurricane bom- 
bardment, because there had been other shoots of this 
kind before, and they made no real attempt to get their 
machine-guns into action. It was from the slopes of the 
Gravenstafel and the Abraham Heights beyond that ma- 
chine-gun fire fell upon the Midland men, and the enemy's 
guns were shooting down the gullies between these ridges. 
But the ground in this part of our attack yesterday was 
taken without grave trouble and without great losses. 

Most of the prisoners taken on this ground were Saxons, 
and those I have seen marching down to a captivity which 
they prefer to the field of battle are men of a good physique, 
and smart, soldierly look. It is astonishing how quickly 
they recover from the effect of bombardment and the great 
horror of battle as soon as they get beyond the range of 
shell-fire. But they are gloomy and disheartened. The of- 
ficers especially acknowledge that things are going badly 
for Germany, and say that there is, for the time at least 
until the new class is ready, a dearth of men of fighting 
age, so that the drafts they get are miserable and unfit. 
They are overwhelmed with the thought of the monstrous 
gun-power which we have brought against them to counter- 
act their own artillery, which once had the mastery, and 
they are struck by the audacity of our air service. 

Certainly our flying men have been doing all in their 
power to make life intolerable on the German side of the 



S66 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

lines. I have already described how they went out on 
Tuesday night and broke up the columns of men marching 
to attack us. One of these birds found a different kind of 
prey. It was opposite the Australian front where a team 
of German gunners were getting a gun away. Our airman 
flew low over the heads of the gunners and played his ma- 
chine-gun on to them and dropped bombs. He smashed up 
the gun-limber and laid out the gunners, and the gun re- 
mains there still, with the bodies of men and horses around 
it. To-day out beyond Ypres I saw flights of our men 
going out again beyond the German lines for that battle 
in the air which has never ceased since the battle of Flan- 
ders two months ago. 

The weather is still in our favour, and there is. a blue 
sky to-day and a soft, golden light over all this Flemish 
countryside where our troops go marching up to the lines 
with their bands playing, or lie resting in the hop-fields 
on the way. That old place of horror, the Yser Canal, 
reflected the blue above, and in the air there was that sense 
of peace which belongs to the golden days of autumn. 
But the guns were loud, and the flight of their shells went 
crying through the sky. 

October 2 
Through the haze which lies low over Flanders, though 
above there is still a blue sky, the noise of great gun-fire 
goes on, rising and falling in gusts, and, like the beat of 
surf to people who live by the sea, it is the constant sound 
in men's ears, not disturbing their work unless they are 
close enough to suffer from the power behind the thunder- 
strokes. The trees are yellowing into crinkled gold, and 
there is the touch and smell of autumn in the night air, and 
the orchards of France are heavy with fruit. Wonderful 
weather, the soldiers say. The artillery battle is endless, 
and on both sides is intense and widespread. It was fol- 
lowed yesterday by five German counter-attacks, which did 
not reach our lines. In a very desperate way the enemy is 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 367 

trying to push us back from positions which are essential 
to the strength of his defence. All his guns are at work. 
Is it the last phase of the war? Does the enemy know that 
he must win or lose all ? Our men have that hope in their 
hearts, and fight more grimly and with higher spirit be- 
cause of it. The success of the last two battles has deep- 
ened the hope, and men come back from the line, back to 
the rest-billets, with the old conviction newly revived that 
at last they have the enemy down and under and very near 
xiopelessness. In the rest-billets are the men who come 
back. They come marching back along the dusty roads 
from the fire-swept zone, first across ground pitted with 
new-made shell-holes, with the howl of shells overhead, 
and then through broken villages on the edge of the bat- 
tlefields, and then through standing villages where only 
a gap or two shows where a haphazard shell has gone, and 
then at last to the clean, sweet country which no high 
explosives reach, unless a hostile airman comes over with 
his bombs. 

In any old billet in Flanders one hears the tale of battle 
told by men who were there, and it is worth while, as yes- 
terday, when I sat down at table with the officers of a bat- 
talion of Suffolks in a Flemish farmhouse. The men were 
camped outside, and as I passed I liked the look of these 
lads, who had just come out of one of the stiffest fights 
of the war. They looked amazingly fresh after one night's 
rest, and they stood in groups telling their yarns in the 
good old dialect of their county, laughing as though it had 
all been a joke, though it was more than a joke with death 
on the prowl. 

"Your men look fit," I said to the colonel of the Suf- 
folks, and he smiled as though he liked my words, and said, 
"You couldn't get their tails down with a crowbar. It 
was a good show, and that makes all the difference. They 
have been telling the Australian boys that you have only 
got to make, a face at the Hun and he puts his hands up. 
They knocked the stuffing out of the enemy." 



368 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Inside the farmhouse there was the battalion mess, at one 
long table and one short, because it was felt better for all 
the officers to be together instead of splitting up into com- 
pany messes. I looked down the rows of faces, these clean- 
cut English faces, and was glad of the luck which had 
brought so many of these young officers back again. They 
told the tale of the battle, and each of them had some de- 
tail- to add, because that was his part of the show, and it 
was his platoon, and they had left the fighting-line the 
night before. They spoke as though all the things had 
happened long ago, and they laughed loudly at episodes of 
gruesome interest and belonging to those humours of war 
which are not to be written. 

There was a thick mist when they went away at dawn, 
so dense that they could not see the line of our barrage 
ahead, though it was a deep belt of bursting shells. They 
had been told to follow close, and they were eager to get 
on. They went too fast, some of them almost incredibly 
fast, over the shell-craters, and round them, and into them, 
and out of them again, stumbling, running, scrambling, not 
turning to look when any comrade fell. 

"I was on the last position three-quarters of an hour 
before the barrage passed," said a young officer of the Suf- 
folks. He spoke the words as if telling something rather 
commonplace, but he knew that I knew the meaning of 
what he said, a frightful and extraordinary thing, for with 
his platoon he had gone ahead of our storm of fire and 
had to wait until it reached and then passed them. Some 
of their losses -were because of that, and yet they might 
have been greater if they had been slower because the 
enemy was caught before they could guess that our men 
were near. They put up no fight in the pill-boxes, those 
little houses of concrete which stank horribly because of 
the filth in them, and from the shell-craters where snipers 
and machine-gunners lay men rose in terror at the sight 
of the brown men about them, and ran this way and that 
like poor frightened beasts, or stood shaking in an ague 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 369 

of fear. Some ran towards their own lines with their 
hands up, shouting "Kamerad," believing they were run- 
ning our way. They were so unready for attack that the 
snipers had the safety-clip on their rifle-barrels, and others 
were without ammunition. 

In one shell-hole was an English-speaking German. "I 
saved him," said one of the young Suffolk officers. "He 
was a downhearted fellow, and said he was fed up with the 
war and wanted nothing but peace." 

Near another shell-hole was a German who looked dead. 
He looked as if he had been dead for a long time, but an 
English corporal who passed close to this body saw a 
hand stretch out for a bayonet within reach, and the man 
raised himself to strike. Like a man who sees a snake with 
his fangs out, the corporal whipped round, grabbed the 
German's bayonet and ran him through. The way to the 
last objective was easy on the whole, and the enemy was 
on the run with our men after them until they were ordered 
to stop and dig in. The hardest time came afterwards, as 
it nearly always comes when the ground gained had to be 
held for three more days and nights without the excite- 
ment of attack and under heavy fire. That is when the 
courage of men is most tried, as this battalion found. The 
enemy had time to pull themselves together. The German 
gunners adapted their range to the new positions and shelled 
fiercely across the ways of approach, and scattered ^g's 
everywhere. It was rifle-fire for the Suffolk men all the 
time. They had not troubled to bring up a great many 
bombs, for the rifle has come into its own again, now that 
the old trench warfare is gone for a time, or all time, and 
with rifle-fire and machine-gun fire they broke down the 
German counter-attacks and caught parties of Germans who 
showed themselves on the slopes of the Passchendaele 
Ridge, and sniped incessantly. They used a prodigious quan- 
tity of small-arms ammunition, and the carriers risked their 
lives every step of the way to get it up to them. They fired 
30,000 rounds and then 16,000 more. There was one 



S70 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

officer who spent all his time sniping from a little patch 
of ground that had once been a garden. He lay behind 
a heaped ruin and used his field-glasses to watch the slopes 
of rising ground on his left, where human ants were crawl- 
ing. Every now and then he fired and picked off an ant 
until his score reached fifty. German planes came flying 
over our troops to get their line, flying very low, so that 
their wings were not a tree's height above the shell-craters, 
and our boys lay doggo not to give themselves away. Some 
of the hostile planes were red-bellied, and others which 
came searching the ground were big, porpoise-like planes. 
They dropped signal-lights and directed the fire of the 59's. 
A private of the Suffolks, lying low but watchful, saw a 
light rise from the ground as one of these machines came 
over, and it was answered from the aeroplane. "That's 
queer," he thought; "dirty work in that shell-hole." He 
crept out to the shell-hole from which the signal had come, 
and found three German soldiers there with rockets. They 
tried to kill him, but it was they who died, and our man 
brought back their rifles and kit as souvenirs. 

More rifle ammunition was wanted as the time passed, 
and the carriers took frightful risks to bring it. The drums 
of the Suffolks did well that day as carriers and stretcher- 
bearers, passing up and down through the barrage-fire, and 
there was a private who guided a party with small-arms 
ammunition — ten thousand rounds of it — to the forward 
troops, with big shells bursting over the ground. Twice 
he was buried by shell-bursts, which flung the earth over 
him, but on the- way back he helped to carry a wounded man 
800 yards to the regimental aid post under hot fire. He 
was a cool-headed and gallant-hearted fellow, and went 
up again as a volunteer to the forward positions, and on 
the same night crawled out on a patrol with a young lieu- 
tenant to reconnoitre a position on the left which was still 
in Gennan hands. From farther left, on rising ground, 
the Germans sprinkled machine-gun fire over the battalion 
support lines, and the earth was spitting with those bullets. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 371 

But in their own lines the German soldiers were moving 
about with Red Cross flags picking up their wounded, and 
they did not fire at our stretcher-bearers, apart from the 
barrage-fire of 5-9's through which they had to make their 
way. Only once did they play a bad trick. Under the 
Red Cross flag some stretcher-bearers went into a pill-box 
which had been abandoned, and shortly after machine-gun 
fire came from it. That is the kind of thing which makes 
men see red. 

i8 

Abraham Heights and Beyond 

October 4 
Another great battle has opened to-day, and in a wide at- 
tack from the ground we captured on September 26, north 
and south of the Polygon Wood crest, our troops have ad- 
vanced upon the Passchendaele Ridge, and have reached the 
Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, which crown a western 
spur of the ridge, and Broodseinde, which is the high point 
and keystone of the enemy's defence lines beyond Zonne- 
beke. South of that they are fighting between Cameron 
House and Becelaere, across the Reutelbeek and its swampy 
ground, and down beyond Polderhoek to the south end of 
the Menin road. The divisions engaged, from north to 
south, were the 29th, 4th, nth, 48th, New Zealand, 3rd, 
2nd, and ist Australians. 

This morning I saw hundreds of prisoners trailing back 
across the battlefield, and crowds of them within the 
barbed-wire enclosures set apart for them behind our lines. 
Our lightly wounded men coming down the tracks for walk- 
ing wounded speak, in spite of their blood and bandages, of 
a smashing blow dealt against the enemy and of complete 
victory. "We have him beat," say the men, and they are 
sure of this, sure of his enormous losses and of his broken 
spirit, although the fighting has been bloody because of the 



S72 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

great gun-fire through which our men have had to pass. 
It has been a strange and terrible battle — terrible, I mean, 
in its great conflict of guns and men — and the enemy, if 
all goes well with us, may have to remember it as a turning- 
point in the history of this war, the point that has turned 
against him with a sharp and deadly edge. For, realizing 
his great peril if we strengthened our hold on the Passchen- 
daele Ridge, and knowing that we intended that — all signs 
showed him that, and all our pressure- on these positions — 
he prepared an attack against us in great strength in order 
to regain the ground he lost on September 26, or, if not that, 
then so to damage us that our advance would be checked 
■ until the weather choked us in the mud again. His small 
counter-attacks, or rather his local counter-attacks, for they 
were not weak, had failed. Even his persistent hammer- 
ing at the right wing by Cameron House, below Polygon 
Wood, had failed to bite deeply into our line, though for 
a time on September 25 it had been a cause of grave anx- 
iety to us and made the battle next day more difficult and 
critical. But these attacks had failed in their purpose, and 
now the German High Command decided for a big blow, 
and it was to be delivered at seven o'clock this morning. 
It was a day and an hour too late. Our battle was fixed 
for an hour before his. 

And so it happened that our men had to pass through 
a German barrage to follow their own, a barrage which 
fell upon them before they leapt up to the assault, and it 
happened also most terribly for the enemy that our men 
were not stopped, but went through that zone of shells, 
and on the other side behind our barrage swept over the 
German assault troops and annihilated their plan of at- 
tack. . . . They did not attack. Their defence even was- 
broken. As our lines of fire crept forward they reached 
and broke the second and third waves of the men who had 
been meant to attack, caught them in their support and re- 
serve positions, and we can only guess what the slaughter 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 373 

has been. It is a slaughter in which five German divisions 
are involved. 

This battle of ours, which looks like one of the greatest 
victories we have had in the war, was being prepared on 
a big scale as soon as the last was fought and won. No 
words of mine can give more than a hint of what those 
preparations meant in the scene of war. For several days 
past the roads to the Front have been choked with columns 
of men marching forward, column after column of glori- 
ous men, hard and fit, and hammering a rhythm on the 
roads with the beat of their feet, and whistling and singing, 
in tune and out of tune, with the fifes and drums far ahead 
of them. Always, night and day, there was the sound of 
this music, always in the stillness of these moonlight nights 
the thud, thud of those tramping feet, always, along any 
track that led towards the salient, the vision of these bat- 
talions led forward by young officers with their trench 
sticks swinging and a. look of pride in their eyes because 
of the fellows behind them. Their steel helmets flashed 
blue in the sun so that a column of them seen from a dis- 
tance was like a blue stream winding between the hop- 
fields, or the broken ruins of old villages, or the litter of 
captured ground. With them and alongside of them went 
the tide of transport — lorries, wagons, London buses, pack- 
mules, guns and limbers, and the black old cookers with 
their trailing smoke. Everywhere there has been a fever 
of work. Tommies, "Chinkies," coloured men piling up 
mountains of ammunition to feed the guns. Under shell- 
fire, bracketing the roads on which they worked, pioneers 
carried on the tracks, put down new lengths of duck-board, 
laid new rails. The enemy's artillery came howling over 
to search out all this work, which had been seen by aero- 
planes, and at night flocks of planes came out in the light 
of the moon to drop bombs on the men and the work. Now 
and again they made lucky hits. — got a dump and sent it 
flaming up in a great torch, killed horses in the wagon- 
lines or labouring up with the transport, laid out groups 



374 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

of men, smashed a train or a truck ; but the work went on, 
never checked, never stopping in its steady flow of energy 
up to the lines, and the valour of all these labourers was 
great and steady in preparing for to-day. Knowing the pur- 
pose of it all, the deadly purpose, the scene of activity by 
any siding filled one with a kind of fear. It was so prodi- 
gious, so vastly schemed. I passed a dump yesterday, and 
again to-day, in the waste ground on the old battlefield near 
Ypres and saw the shells for our field-batteries being un- 
loaded. There were thousands of shells, brand-new from 
the factories at home, all bright and glistening and laid out 
in piles. The guns were greedy. Here was food for a 
monstrous appetite. We watched all this — the faces of 
the men going up so bright-eyed, so splendid in their youth, 
so gay, and all these shells and guns and materials of war, 
and all this movement which surged about us and caught 
us up like straws in its tide, and then we looked at the sky 
and smelt the wind, and studied a milky ring which formed 
about the moon. Rain was coming. If only it would 
come lightly or hold another day or two — one night at 
least. 

Rain fell a little yesterday. The ground was sticky 
when I went up beyond Wieltje to look at the Passchen- 
daele Ridge to see some boys getting ready for the "show" 
to-day, and to watch the beginning of the great bombard- 
ment. . . . Curse the rain! It would make all the differ- 
ence to our fighting men, the difference perhaps between 
great success and half a failure, and the difference between 
life and death to many of those boys who looked steadily 
towards the German lines which they were asked to take. 
What damnable luck it would be if the rain fell heavily! 
Last night the moon was hidden and rain fell, but not very 
hard, though the wind went howling across the flats of 
Flanders. And this morning, when our men rose from 
shell-holes and battered trenches and fields of upheaved 
earth to make this great attack, the rain fell still but softly, 
so that the ground was only sticky and sludgy, but not a 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 375 

bog. The rain was glistening on their steel helmets, and 
the faces of our fighting men were wet when they went 
forward. They had passed already through a fiery ordeal, 
and some of them could not rise to go with their comrades, 
and lay dead on the ground. Along the lines of men, these 
thousands of men, the stretcher-bearers were already busy 
in the dark, because the enemy had put over a heavy bar- 
rage at 5.30, and elsewhere later, the prelude to the at- 
tack he had planned. His old methods of defence and 
counter-attack had broken down in two battles. The spell 
of the pill-box, which had worked well for a time, was 
broken, so that those concrete blockhouses were feared as 
death-traps by the men who had to hold them. The Ger- 
man High Command hurried to prepare a new plan, guess- 
ing ours, and moved the guns to be ready for our next at- 
tack, registered on their own trenches, which they knew 
they might lose, and assembled the best divisions, or the 
next best, ready for a heavy blow to wind us before we 
started and to smash our lines, so that the advance would 
be a thousand times harder. The barrage which the Ger- 
mans sent over was the beginning of the new plan. It 
failed because of the fine courage of our troops first of all, 
and because the German infantry attack was timed an 
hour too late. If it had come two hours earlier it might 
have led to our undoing — might at least have prevented 
anything like real victory to-day. But the fortune of war 
was on our side, and the wheel turned round to crush the 
enemy. 

The main force of his attack, which was to be made by 
the Fourth Guards Division, with two others, I am told, in 
support, was ready to assault the centre of our battle-front 
in the direction of Polygon Wood and down from the 
Broodseinde cross-roads. It was our men who fought the 
German assault divisions at the Broodseinde cross-roads, 
and took many prisoners from them before they had time to 
advance very far. The enemy's shelling had been heavy 
about the ground of Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, 



376 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

where a week or so ago I saw the frightful heaps of Ger- 
man dead, and spread over a wide area of our line of bat- 
tle along the Polygon Wood heights and the low ground in 
front of Zonnebeke. The men tell me that it did not do 
them as much harm as they expected. The shells plunged 
deep into the soft ground, bursting upwards in tall col- 
umns, as I saw them this morning on the field, and their 
killing effect was not widespread. Many of them also 
missed our waves altogether. So, half an hour later, our 
men went away behind our own barrage, which was enor- 
mous and annihilating. The wet mist lay heavily over 
the fields, and it was almost dark except for a pale glamour 
behind the rain-clouds, which brightened as each quarter 
of an hour passed, with our men tramping forward slowly 
to their first objective. 

The shell-craters on the German side were linked to- 
gether here and there to form a kind of trench system, but 
many of these had been blown out by other shell-bursts, 
and German soldiers lay dead in them. From others, men 
and boys, many boys of eighteen, rose with their arms up- 
stretched, as white in the face as dead men, but living, and 
afraid. Across these frightful fields men came running 
towards our soldiers. They did not come to fight, but to 
escape from the shell-fire, which tossed up the earth about 
them, and to surrender. Many of them were streaming 
with blood, wounded about the head and face, or with 
broken and bleeding arms. So I saw them early this 
morning when they came down the tracks which led away 
from that long line of flaming gun-fire. 

The scene of the battle in those early hours was a great 
and terrible picture. It will be etched as long as life lasts 
in the minds of men who saw it. The ruins of Ypres were 
vague and blurred in the mist as I passed them on the way 
up, but as moment passed moment the jagged stump of the 
Cloth Hall, and the wild wreckage of the asylum, and the 
fretted outline of all this chaos of masonry which was so 
fair a city once, leapt out in light which flashed redly and 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 377 

passed. So it was all along the way to the old German 
lines. Bits of villages still stand, enough to show that 
buildings were there, and where isolated ruins of barns and 
farmhouses lie in heaps of timber and brickwork about 
great piles of greenish sand-bags and battered earthworks. 
Through shell-holes in fragments of walls red light stabbed 
like a flame, and out of the darkness of the mist they shone 
for a second with an unearthly brightness. It was the light 
of our gun-fire. Our guns were everywhere in the low 
concealing mist, so that one could not walk anywhere to 
avoid the blast of their fire. They made a fury of fire. 
Flashes leapt from them with only the pause of a second 
or two while they were reloaded. There was never a mo- 
ment within my own range of vision when hundreds of 
great guns were not firing together. They were eating up 
shells which I had seen going up to them, and the roads 
and fields across which I walked were littered with shells. 
The wet mist was like one great damp fire, with ten miles 
or more of smoke rising in a white vapour, through which 
the tongues of flames leapt up, stirred by some fierce wind. 
The noise was terrifying in its violence. Passing one of 
those big-bellied howitzers was to me an agony. It rose 
like a beast stretching out its neck, and there came from 
it a roar which clouted one's ear-drums and shook one's 
body with a long tremor of concussion. These things were 
all firing at the hardest pace, and the earth was shaken 
with their blasts of fire. The enemy was answering back. 
His shells came whining and howling through all this 
greater noise, and burst with a crash on either side of mule 
tracks and over bits of ruin near by, and in the fields on 
each side of the paths down which German prisoners came 
staggering with their wounded. Fresh shell-holes, enor- 
mously deep and thickly grouped, showed that he had plas- 
tered this ground fiercely, but now, later in the morning, 
his shelling eased off, and his guns had other work to do 
over there where our infantry was advancing. Other work, 
unless the guns lay smashed, with their teams lying dead 



378 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

around them, killed by our counter-battery work with high 
explosives and gas; for in the night we smothered them 
with gas and tried to keep them quiet for this battle and all 
others. 

I went eastward and mounted a pile of rubbish and tim- 
ber, all blown into shapelessness and reeking with foul 
odours, and from that shelter looked across to the Pass- 
chendaele Ridge and Hill 40 on the west of Zonnebeke and 
the line of the ridge that goes round to Polygon Wood. It 
was all blurred, so that I could not see the white ruins of 
Zonnebeke as I saw them the other day in the sunlight, nor 
the broken church tower of Passchendaele. It was all 
veiled in smoke and mist, through which the ridge loomed 
darkly with a black hump where Broodseinde stands. But 
clearly through the gloom were the white and yellow 
cloud-bursts of our shell-fire and the flame of their shell- 
bursts. It was the most terrible bombardment I have seen, 
and I saw the fire of the Somme, and of Vimy, and Arras, 
and Messines. Those were not like this, great as they were 
in frightfulness. The whole of the Passchendaele Crest 
was like a series of volcanoes belching up pillars of earth 
and fire. "It seemed to us," said soldier after soldier who 
came down from those slopes, "as if no mortal man could 
live in it, yet there were many who lived despite all the 
dead." 

I saw the living men. Below the big pile of timber and 
muck on which I stood was a winding path, and other tracks 
on each side o'f it between the deep shell-craters, and down 
these ways came batches of prisoners and the trail of our 
walking wounded. It was a tragic sight in spite of its proof 
of victory, and the valour of our men and the spirit of 
these wounded of ours, who bore their pain with stoic pa- 
tience and said, when I spoke to them, "It's been a good 
day; we're doing fine, I think." The Germans were hag- 
gard and white-faced men, thin and worn and weary and 
frightened. Many of them, a large number of them, were 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 379 

wounded. Some of them had masks of dry blood on their 
faces, and some of them wet blood all down their tunics. 
They held broken arms from which the sleeves had been 
cut away, and hobbled painfully on wounded legs. The 
worst were no worse than some of our own men who came 
down with them and among" them. 

It has been a bad defeat for them, and they do not 
hide their despair. They did not fight stubbornly for the 
most part, but ran one way or the other as soon as our 
barrage passed and revealed our men. Our gun-fire had 
overwhelmed them. In the blockhouses were groups of 
men who gasped out words of surrender. Here and there 
they refused to come out till bombs burst outside their steel 
doors. And here and there they got their machine-guns 
to work and checked our advance for a time, as at Joist 
Farm, on the right of our attack, and at a chateau near 
Polderhoek, where there has been severe fighting. There 
was heavy machine-gun fire from a fortified farm ruin 
to the north of Broodseinde, and again from Kronprinz 
Farm on the extreme left. The enemy also put down a 
heavy machine-gun barrage from positions around Pass- 
chendaele, but nothing has stopped our men seriously so 
far. 

The New-Zealanders and Australians swept up and be- 
yond the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, went through 
and past the ruins of Zonnebeke village, and with great 
heroism gained the high ground about Broodseinde, a domi- 
nating position giving observation of all the enemy's side 
of the country. It has been a wonderful battle in the suc- 
cess that surmounted all difficulty, and if we can keep 
what we have gained it will be a victorious achievement. 
The weather is bad now and the rain is heavier, with a 
savage wind blowing. But that is not good for the enemy's 
plans, and may be in our favour now that the day has gone 
well. Our English troops share the honour of the day 
with the Anzacs, and all were splendid. 



S80 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

October 5 
The men who were fighting in the great battle yesterday, 
and after the capture of many strong positions held their 
ground last night in spite of many German counter-attacks 
and heavy fire, tell grim tales, which all go to build up the 
general picture of the most smashing defeat we have in- 
flicted on the enemy. 

On one section of the Front, where the War wicks, Sher- 
woods, Lancashire Fusiliers and other county troops of the 
48th and nth Divisions fought up to Poelcappelle and its 
surrounding blockhouses, six enemy battalions in the front 
line were either taken or killed. The men themselves do 
not know those figures. They only know that they passed 
over large numbers of dead and that they took many pris- 
oners. 

The New-Zealanders and the Australians on their right, 
fighting up the Abraham Heights, took over 2000 prison- 
ers, and say that they have never seen so many dead as 
those who lay shapeless in their tracks. Other Australians 
fighting for the Broodseinde cross-roads have counted 960 
dead Germans on their way. The full figure of the Ger- 
man dead will never be counted by us. They lie on this 
battle-ground buried and half-buried in the water of shell- 
holes, in blockhouses blown on top of them, and in dug- 
outs that have become their tombs. They fought bravely 
in some places with despairing courage in or about some of 
the blockhouses which still gave them a chance of resist- 
ance, and sometimes worked their machine-guns to the 
last. Men lying in shell-craters still alive among all their 
dead used their rifles and sniped our men, knowing that 
they would have to pay for their shots with their lives. 
That is courage, and New-Zealanders I met to-day, and 
English lads, were fair to their enemy, and said Fritz 
showed great pluck when he had a dog's chance, though 
many of them ran when we got close to them behind the 
barrage. It was the barrage that made them break. The 
Fourth Guards Division seems to have fought well on the 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 381 

line of our first objective, though after that they would not 
stand firm, and ran or surrendered Hke the others. 

Owing to the coincidence of the simultaneous attack 
from both sides yesterday morning, and the complete over- 
throw of the German assault divisions who were about to 
advance on us, there seems no doubt that some confusion 
prevailed behind the German lines and on the left and centre 
of our attack. All their attempts at coimter-thrusts were 
badly planned, and led to further disaster. They did not 
advance in orderly formation, but straggled up from local 
reserves and supports, and were smashed in detail by our 
artillery. So it happened with two battalions who came 
down the road to Poelcappelle, but withered away. The 
Lancashire Fusiliers of the nth Division in that region 
say the thing was laughable, though it is the comedy of 
war, and not mirthful in the usual sense. Small groups of 
Germans wandered up in an aimless way, and were shot 
down by machine-gun and rifle fire. On the right of the 
battle-front the enemy's attacks have been more serious 
and thrust home with grim persistence against the "Koy- 
lies," Lincolns, West Kents, and Scottish Borderers of the 
5th Division. 

It was after the advance of our men on Polderhoek and 
its chateau by the Gheluvelt spur of the Passchendaele 
Ridge. Some of the Surreys, Devons, and Duke of Corn- 
wall's Light Infantry swung round the stream and marsh- 
lands of the Reutel and accounted for many of the enemy 
in close and fierce fighting. The Devons were astride the 
stream and, working north of it, attacked a slope called 
Juniper Spur. 

In Polderhoek was a nest of machine-guns, which fired 
out of the ruins of the chateau, and for some time our men 
had difficult and deadly work. This was worst against 
the Scottish Borderers, who were facing the chateau 
grounds, but they dug in and made some cover, while be- 
hind the prisoners, about 500 of them, were getting back 
to the safety of our lines. 



382 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

It was at three o'clock in the afternoon that the enemy 
sent a very strong counter-attack down the slopes of the 
Gheluvelt Spur against the 5th and 7th Divisions. Six 
times through the afternoon masses of men appeared and 
tried to force their way forward, but each time they were 
caught under rifle-fire and machine-guns and artillery. 

It was at seven o'clock that the heaviest attack came, 
under cover of savage shelling, and our men had to fall 
back on the ground beyond Cameron House, which is the 
scene of the enemy's fierce attacks on September 25, when 
they were for some little time a serious menace to us. This 
morning the enemy had driven a wedge into our line in this 
neighbourhood, and it is quite possible that he will deliver 
other blows in the same direction. Last night he made 
no great endeavour to bet gack ground. It was a dirty 
night for our men, who had been fighting all day. The 
rain fell heavily, filling the shell-holes and turning all the 
broken ground of battle to the same old bog which made 
so much misery in Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood 
and other positions attacked on July 31 and afterwards. 

"I lay up to my waist in water," said one of the Devons 
who came down wounded this morning; "it was bitter cold, 
and Fritz was putting over his 5-9's; he was also putting 
over a lot of machine-gun fire, and the bullets came over 
the heads of our men like the cracking of whips." It was 
bad for the wounded and the stretcher-bearers — the splen- 
did stretcher-bearers, who worked all through the night 
up and down through fierce barrage-fire. 

Most of them got through with their burdens by that 
queer miracle of luck which is often theirs. But one little 
party came down when the fire was fiercest, and took cover 
in a shell-hole close beside some Warwickshire boys who 
were crouching in another hole until the storm of shells 
had passed. Suddenly they heard the howl of a monstrous 
shell — an eight-inch or even a twelve-inch by the noise of it. 
It fell and burst right inside the shell-crater where the 
stretcher-bearers were huddled with their wounded men, 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 383 

and they were blown out of it yards high, so that their 
bodies were tossed Hke straws in a fierce wind. ... I met 
many men who worked their way down under fire like that, 
and some who had been wounded already were wounded 
again, and some of the comrades who trudged with theni 
were killed. 

The Warwickshire battalions of the 48th Division on the 
left of the New-Zealanders had some very hard fighting, 
lasting all through the day, which concluded with an at- 
tack on a position called Terrier Farm, above the pill-boxes 
of Wellington House and Winchester House, which they 
had captured after some bad quarters of an hour. 

The Warwicks had started with great luck. In spite 
of the German shelling they had got away to their first 
objective with only three casualties. They went through 
the first line of blockhouses without much trouble, picking 
up prisoners on the way in most of them. Their first trouble 
came from one of these concrete places called Wellington 
House. Machine-gun fire came crackling from it, and bul- 
lets were also sweeping the ground from hidden emplace- 
ments. After twenty minutes' struggle Wellington House 
fell, and the flanks on either side closed up and went for- 
ward, the Warwicks helped on the right by a body of New 
Zealand men. In the centre the machine-gun fire from 
those concrete walls ahead caused a check and a gap, and 
although they tried many times with great gallantry, under 
brave officers, to silence that fire and work round the block- 
houses, they could not do this without greater loss, and 
decided to link up with their flanks by digging a loop-line in 
front of those positions, which make a small wedge, or 
pocket, in our line there. 

The attack against Terrier Farm was done by other War- 
wickshire lads, who were very game after a long day un- 
der fire, but for all their spirit tired and cold. They stood 
almost knee-deep in mud, and they were wet to the skin, as 
it was now raining steadily, so a Tank came up to help 
them, and drew close enough to Terrier Farm to fire broad- 



384 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

sides at its concrete and machine-gun its loophole. A white 
rag thrust through a hole in the wall was the sign of the 
enemy's surrender. But the conditions were too bad for 
any greater progress, and the men dug in for the night, 
while brother Tank crawled back. 

All the Tanks used in the battle did well, in spite of the 
bad going, and helped to reduce several of the blockhouses. 
They had only two casualties among their crews, and most 
of them got back to their hiding-places without damage from 
German shells. 

It is astounding that the German counter-attacks were so 
quickly signalled to the guns, for the light all day was 
bad, and the weather was dead against the work of the 
flying men. They did their best by flying low and risking 
the enemy's fire. There was one pilot who is the talk of 
the Australians to-day. They watched that English child 
doing the most amazing "stunts" over the fighting-lines. He 
was out all day, swooping low, so that his plane seemed just 
to skim over the craters. The Germans tried to get him by 
any manner of means. They turned their "Archies" on to 
him and their machine-guns, and then tried to bring him 
down with rifle-fire, and that failing, though they pierced 
his wings many times, they called up the heavies and tried 
fo snipe him with 5-9's, which are mighty big and beastly 
things. But he went on flying till many of his wires were 
cut and his struts splintered, and his aeroplane was a rag 
round an engine. He was bruised and dazed when he came 
to earth, making a bad landing in our own* lines, but not kill- 
ing either himself or the observer, who shares the honour 
and the marvel of this exploit. 

It was a great day for the Australians and the New- 
Zealanders, their greatest and most glorious day. I saw 
them going up — these lithe, loose-limbed, hatchet-faced fel- 
lows, who look so free and fine in their slouch hats and so 
hard and grim in their steel helmets. There were many 
thousands of them on the roads or camped beside the roads. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 385 

and Flanders for a time seemed to have become a little 
province of Australia, 

Then the New-Zealanders came along, a type half-way 
between the English of the old country and the Australian 
boys — not so lean and wiry, with more colour in the cheeks, 
and a squarer, fuller build. It was good to see them — as 
fine a set of boys as one could see in the whole world, so 
that it was hard to think of them in the furnace fires up 
there, and to know that some of them would come back 
maimed and broken. In a dug-out on the battlefield I talked 
with some of them, and they were cheery lads, full of con- 
fidence in the coming battle. They wanted to go as far 
as the Australians, to do as well, and among the Australians 
also there was a friendly rivalry, the new men wanting to 
show their mettle to those who are already old in war, one 
battalion keen to earn the honour which belongs by right of 
valour to another which had fought before. It was certain 
they would get to the Broodseinde cross-roads if human 
courage could get there against high explosives, and they 
were there without a check, over every obstacle, regardless 
of the enemy's fire, too fast some of them behind their own. 
So the New-Zealanders went up to Abraham Heights and 
carried all before them. The hardest time was last night in 
the mud and the cold, under heavy fire now and then, but 
they have stuck it out, as our English boys have stuck it 
through many foul days and in harder times than these, and 
that is good enough. 

The German prisoners do not hide their astonishment at 
the spirit of our men, and they know now that our troops 
are terrible in attack, and arrive upon them with a strange, 
fearful suddenness behind the barrage. One man, a Ger- 
man professor of broad intelligence and a frank way of fac- 
ing ugly facts, said that our artillery was too terrific for 
words. They got harassed all the way up to the front line, 
and lost many men. When they got there they had to lie 
flat in the bottom of shell-holes, and the next thing they 
knew was when they were surrounded by masses of English 



386 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

soldiers. He described our men as gallant and chivalrous. 
This professor thinks it will not be long before Germany 
makes a great bid for peace by offering to give up Belgium. 
By midwinter she will yield Alsace-Lorraine, Russia will 
remain as before the war, except for an autonomous Po- 
land ; Italy will have what she has captured ; and Germany 
will get back some of her colonies, he thinks. He laughed 
when an indemnity was mentioned, and said "Germany is 
bankrupt." He describes the German Emperor as a broken 
man and all for peace, the Crown Prince posing as the head 
of the military party but being unpopular. If the German 
people knew that the submarine threat had failed they would 
demand that the war should stop at once. That is the 
opinion of one educated German who has suffered the full 
horror of war, and his words are interesting if they repre- 
sent no more than his own views. 



^9 
Scenes of Battle 

October 7 
The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went 
away in the wet mist for the great battle up the slopes of 
the Passchendaele Ridge, has been dark and grim and over- 
cast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds are blown into 
wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country 
round Ypres, XVhich still in its ruins holds the soul of all 
the monstrous tragedy hereaboutb, white cloud-mountains 
were piled up against black, sullen peaks and were shot 
through with a greenish light, very ghastly in its revelation 
of the litter and the wreckage of the great arena of human 
slaughter. Etched sharply against this queer luminance 
were the lopped trunks of shell-slashed trees and bits of 
ruined buildings with tooth-like jags above heaps of fallen 
masonry. Rain fell heavily for most of the day, as nearly 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 387 

all the night, and as it rains to-day, and a wet fog rose from 
the ground where the shell-craters were already ponds 
brimming over into swamps of mud. Through the murk 
our guns fired incessantly, almost as intense as the drum- 
fire which precedes an attack, though there was no attack 
from our side or the enemy's, and it was a strange, un- 
canny thing to hear all that crashing of gun-fire and the wail 
of great shells in flight to the German lines through this 
midday darkness. 

I marvelled at the gunners, who have gone on so long — 
so long through the days and nights — feeding those mon- 
sters. The infantry have a hard time. It is they who fight 
with flesh and blood against the machinery of slaughter 
which is set against them. It is they who go out across the 
fields on that wild adventure into the unknown. But the 
gunners, standing by the heavies and the i8-pounders in 
the sodden fields, with piles of shells about them and great 
dumps near by, have no easy, pleasant time. On the 
morning of the last battle I saw the enemy's shells search- 
ing for them, flinging up the earth about their batteries, 
ploughing deep holes on either side of them. They worked 
in the close neighbourhood of death, and at any moment, 
between one round and another, a battery and its gun teams 
might be blown up by one of those howling beasts which 
seem to gather strength and ferocity at the end of their 
flight before the final roar of destruction. Now and again 
a lucky shell of the enemy's gets an ammunition dump, and 
a high torch rises to the dark sky, and in its flames there 
are wild explosions as the shells are touched off. But the 
gunners go on with their work in all the tumult of their 
own batteries, deafening and ear-splitting and nerve-de- 
stroying, and our young gunner officers, muddy, unshaven, 
unwashed, with sleep-drawn eyes, pace up and down the 
line of guns saying, "Are you ready. Number One? — 
Number One, fire!" with no sign of the strain that keeps 
them on the rack when a big battle is in progress. For them 
the battle lasts longer than for the infantry. It begins be- 



388 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

fore the infantry advanced, it lulls a little and then breaks 
out into new fury when the German counter-attacks begin. 
It does not end when the SOS signals have been answered 
by hours of bombardment, but goes on again to keep Ger- 
man roads under fire, to smother their back areas, to bat- 
ter their gun positions. 

So yesterday, when the German guns were getting back 
behind the Passchendaele, hauled back out of the mud to 
take up new emplacements from which they can pour ex- 
plosives on the ground we have captured, our gunners 
could not rest, but made this work hideous for the enemy 
and followed his guns along their tracks. The British gun- 
ners in these frightful battles have worked with a courage 
and endurance to the limit of human nature, and the in- 
fantry are the first to praise them and to marvel at them. 
The infantry go marching in the rain and trudging in the 
mud, and stumbling over the water-logged craters, and out 
on the battlefields stand knee-deep in pools and bogs that 
have been made by shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the 
Flemish brooks, like the Hanebeek and the Stroombeek and 
the Reutelbeek, and by the heavy downpour on the up- 
heaved earth. Winter conditions have come upon us, too. 
They were the old winter pictures of war that I saw yester- 
day round about the old Ypres salient, when wet men 
gathered under the lee side of old dug-outs with cold rain 
sweeping upon them, so that their waterproof capes stream 
with water, and pattering upon their steel hats with a sharp 
metallic tinkling sound. Along the roads Australian and 
New Zealand horsemen go riding hard, with their horses' 
flanks splashed with heavy gobs of mud. Gun-wagon^-and 
transports pass, flinging mud from their wheels. Ambu- 
lances, with their red crosses spattered with slime, go thread- 
ing their way to the clearing-stations, with four pairs of 
muddy boots upturned beneath the blankets which show 
through the flap behind, and a dozen "sitting cases" huddled 
together, with their steel hats clashing and their tired eyes 
looking out on the traffic of war which they are leaving for 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 389 

a time. They come down cold and wet from the line, but 
in an hour or two they are warm, inside the dressing-sta- 
tions, between sand-bagged walls built up inside ruined 
houses, still within range of shell-fire, but safer than the 
fields from which these men have come, ^ 

"If any man feels cold," said a medical officer yesterday, 
''give him a hot-water bottle. To a man who had been lying 
in cold mud until an hour or two before it was like offer- 
ing him a place by the fireside at home. 

The Y.M.C.A, is busy in another tent or another dug- 
out. It has a cheery way of producing hot cocoa on the 
edge of a battlefield and of thrusting little packets of choco- 
late, biscuits, cigarettes, and matches into the hands of 
lightly wounded men as soon as they have trudged down 
the long trail for walking wounded and reached the first 
dressing-station, where there is a little group of men waiting 
to bandage their wounds, to say, "Well done, laddy ; you did 
grandly this morning," and to fix them up with strange and 
wonderful speed for the journey to the base hospital, where 
there are beds with white sheets — sheets again, ye gods ! — 
and rest and peace and warmth. 

There are queer little groups between the sand-bags of 
those forward dressing-stations. On one bench I saw a tall 
New-Zealander and some Warwick boys — the Warwicks of 
the 48th Division did famously in this battle — and a 
farmer's lad from the West Country, who said "It seems 
to Oi," and spoke with a fine simple gravity of the things 
he had seen and done; and a thin- faced Lancashire boy, who 
still wanted to kill more Germans and put them to a nasty 
kind of death; and a fellow of the Lincolns, who said, 
"Our lads went over grand." 

Near by was a wounded German soldier who had clotted 
blood over his face and a bloody bandage round his head. 
A friendly voice spoke to him and said, "Wie gehts mit 
Ihnen?" ("How are you getting on?") And he looked up 
in a dazed way and said, "Besser hier als am Kampfe." 
("Better here than on the battlefield.") 



390 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

The tall New-Zealander said: "Fritz fought all right. 
His machine-gunners fired till we were all round them." 
^" 'Twas a bit of a five-point-nine that hit Oi in the arm," 
said the farmer's lad. "He put over a terrible big barrage, 
and Oi was a-laying up till the waist in a shell-hole all filled 
with mud, and Oi was starved with cold." 

"They're all cowards, them Fritzes," said the Lancashire 
boy. "They ran so hard I couldn't catch them with my 
bayonet. Then a bullet came and went slick through my 
head." The bullet failed to kill the Lancashire boy by the 
smallest fraction of an inch, and had furrowed his skull. 

The Warwickshire lads told queer tales of the battle, and 
they bear out what I have heard from their officers else- 
where. There were numbers of German soldiers who lay 
about in shell-holes after our barrage had passed over their 
lines and their blockhouses, and sniped our officers and men 
as they swarmed forward, though they knew that by not 
surrendering they were bound to die. It was the last su- 
preme courage of the human beast at bay. There was one 
of these who lay under the wreckage of an aeroplane, and 
from that cover he shot some of our men at close range; 
but because there were many bullets flying about, and shells 
bursting, and all the excitement of a battle-ground, he was 
not discovered for some time. It was a sergeant of the 
Warwicks who saw him first, and just in time. The Ger- 
man had his rifle raised at ten yards range, but the sergeant 
whipped round and shot him before he could turn. Some of 
these men were discovered after the general fighting was 
over, and a nasty shock was given to a young A.D.C. who 
went with his Divisional General to see the captured ground 
next day. The General, who is a quick walker, went ahead 
over the shell-craters, and the A.D.C. suddenly saw two 
Germans wearing their steel helmets rise before the Gen- 
eral from one of the deep holes. 

"Now there's trouble," thought the young officer, feeling 
for his revolver. But when he came up he heard the Gen- 
eral telling two wounded Germans that the English had won 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 391 

a very great victory, and that if they were good boys he 
would send up stretcher-bearers to carry them down. 

All over the battlefield there were queer little human 
.episodes thrust for a minute or two into the great grim 
drama of this advance by British and Overseas troops up 
the heights of the Passchendaele Ridge, where thousands 
of German soldiers who had been waiting to attack them 
were caught by the rolling storm of shells which smashed 
the earth about them and mingled them with its clods. One 
tragic glimpse like this was on the Australian way up to 
the Broodseinde cross-roads, the key of the whole position, 
after a body of those Australians had marched many miles 
through the night over appalling ground under scattered 
shell-fire, and were only in their place of attack half an 
hour before it started. The story of that night march is in 
itself a little epic, but that is not the episode I mean. The 
Australians drew close to one of the blockhouses, and the 
sound of their cheering must have been heard by the Ger- 
mans inside those concrete walls. The barrage had just 
passed and its line of fire, volcanic in its look and fury, went 
travelling ahead. Suddenly, out of the blockhouses, a dozen 
men or so came running, and the Australians shortened 
their bayonets. From the centre of the group a voice 
shouted out in English, 'T am a Middlesex man, don't shoot. 
I am an Englishman." The man who called had his hands 
up, in sign of surrender, like the German soldiers. 

"It's a spy," said an Australian. "Kill the blighter." The 
English voice again rang out : "I'm English." And Eng- 
lish he was. It was a man of the Middlesex Regiment who 
had been captured on patrol some days before. The Ger- 
mans had taken him into their blockhouse, and because of 
our gun-fire they could not get out of it, and kept him 
there. He was well treated, and his captors shared their 
food with him, but the awful moment came to him when 
the drum-fire passed and he knew that unless he held his 
hands high he would be killed by our own troops. 

The New-Zealanders had many fights on the way up to 



392 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, and one thing that 
surprised them was the number of pill-boxes and block- 
houses inhabited by the enemy close to their own lines. They 
believed that the foremost ones had been deserted. But 
it must not be forgotten that running all through the narra- 
tive of this battle is the thwarted plan of the enemy to at- 
tack us in strength the same morning and at nearly the same 
hour. For that reason he had thrust little groups of men 
into advanced posts and into these most forward block- 
houses with orders to hold them at all costs until the at- 
tacking divisions should reach and pass them. And for 
that reason, as we know, the enemy's guns laid down a 
heavy barrage over our lines half an hour before our at- 
tack started. 

The New-Zealanders did not escape this shelling, and 
their brigadiers were under the strain of intense anxiety, 
not knowing in their dug-outs, over which the enemy's fire 
passed, whether their boys were so cut up that a successful 
assault would be impossible. As it happened, the New- 
Zealanders were not seriously hurt nor thrown into disorder. 
When the moment came they went away in waves, with the 
spirit of a pack of hounds on a good hunting morning. As 
fierce as that and as wild as that. They had not gone more 
than a few yards before they had fifty prisoners. This was 
at a blockhouse just outside the New Zealand assembly 
line. There was no fight there, but the garrison surrendered 
as soon as our men were round their shelter. The Hane- 
beek stream flows this way, but it was no longer within its 
bounds. Our gun-fire had smashed up its track, and all 
about was a swamp made deeper by the rains. 

The New Zealand lads had a devil of a time in getting 
across and through. Some of them stuck up to the knees 
and others fell into shell-holes, deep in mud, as far as their 
belts. "Give us a hand. Jack," came a shout from one man, 
and the answer was, "Hang on to my rifle, Tom." Men 
with the solid ground under their feet hauled out others 
in the slough, and all that was a great risk of time while 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 393 

the barrage was travelling slowly on with its protecting 
screen of shells. 

The only chance of life in these battles is to keep close 
to the barrage, risking the shorts, for if it once passes and 
leaves any enemy there with a machine-gun, there is cer- 
tain death for many men. The New Zealand boys nearly 
lost that wall of shells because of the mud, but somehow 
or other managed to scramble on over 800 yards in time 
enough to catch it up. Many blockhouses yielded up their 
batches of prisoners, who were told to get back and give no 
trouble. The first fight for a blockhouse took place at Van 
Meulen Farm, just outside the New-Zealanders' first ob- 
jective. The barrage went ahead and sat down — as one of 
the officers put it, though the sitting down of a barrage is 
a queer simile for that monstrous eruption of explosive 
force. From Van Meulen Farm came the swish of machine- 
gun bullets, and New Zealand boys began to drop. They 
were held up for half an hour until the "leap-frog" bat- 
talions — that is to say, the men who were to pass through 
the first waves to the next objective — came up to help. 

It was a New Zealand captain, beloved by all his men for 
his gallantry and generous-hearted ways, who led the rush 
of Lewis-gunners and bombers and riflemen. He fell dead 
with a machine-gun bullet in his heart, but with a cry of 
rage because of this great loss the other men ran on each 
side of the blockhouse and stormed it. 

On the left of the New-Zealanders' line, one of their 
battalions could see Germans firing from concrete houses on 
the slopes of the Gravenstafel, and although they had to 
lose the barrage, which was sweeping ahead again, they 
covered that ground and went straight for those places un- 
der sharp fire. Some of them worked round the concrete 
walls and hauled out more prisoners. "Get back, there," 
they shouted, but there was hardly a New-Zealander who 
would go back with them to act as escort. So it happened 
that a brigadier, getting out of his dug-out to see what was 
happening to his men away there over the slopes, received 



394) FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the first news of success from batches of Germans who 
came marching in company formation under the command 
of their own officers, and without escort. That was how I 
saw many of them coming back on another part of the field. 
From the Abraham Heights there was a steady stream of 
machine-gun fire until the New-Zealanders had climbed 
them and routed out the enemy from their dug-outs, which 
were not screened by our barrage so that they were able to 
fire. Only the great gallantry of high-spirited young men 
could have done that, and it is an episode which proved the 
quality of New Zealand troops on that morning of the bat- 
tle, so keen to do well, so reckless of the cost. On Abra- 
ham Heights a lot of prisoners were taken and joined the 
long trail that hurried back through miles of scattered 
shell-fire from their own guns. 

The next resistance was at the blockhouse called Berlin, 
and the New-Zealanders are proud of having taken that 
place, because of its name, which they will write on their 
scroll of honour. It is not an Imperial place. It is a row 
of dirty concrete pill-boxes above a deep cave, on the pat- 
tern of the old type of dug-outs. But it was a strong 
fortress for German machine-gunners, and they defended 
it stubbornly. It was a five minutes' job. Stokes mortars 
were brought up and fired thirty rounds in two minutes, 
and then, with a yell, the New-Zealanders rushed the posi- 
tion on both sides and flung pea-bombs through the back 
door, until part of the garrison streamed out shouting their 
word of surrender. The other men were dead inside. A 
battalion commander and his stafif were taken prisoners in 
another farm, and the New-Zealanders drank soda-water 
and smoked high-class cigarettes which they found in this 
place, where the German officers were well provided. After 
that refreshment they went on to Berlin Wood, where there 
were several pill-boxes hidden among the fallen trees and 
mud-heaps. They had to make their way through a ma- 
chine-gun barrage, and platoon commanders assembled their 
Lewis-gunners and riflemen to attack the house in detail. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 395 

From one of them a German officer directed the fire, and 
when the gun was silenced inside came out with another 
and fired round the corner of the wall until our men rushed 
upon him. Even then he raised his revolver as though to 
shoot a sergeant, who was closest to him, but he was killed 
by a bayonet-thrust. 

At other parts of the line our English boys were fight- 
ing hard and with equal courage, and some of them against 
greater fire. It was on the right that the enemy's gun-fire 
was most fierce, and our old English county regiments of 
the 5th and 7th Divisions — Devons and Staffords, Surreys 
and Kents, Lincolns with Scottish Borderers, Northumber- 
land Fusiliers, and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry — op- 
posite Gheluvelt and Polderhoek and the Reutelbeek had to 
endure some bad hours. I have already mentioned in earlier 
messages how the enemy made ceaseless thrusts against this 
right flank of our attacking front, driving a wedge in for a 
time, so that our men had to fall back a little and form a de- 
cisive flank. It is known now that they were misled some- 
what by some isolated groups of the enemy who held out in 
pill-boxes behind Cameron House. When these were 
cleared out our line swept forward again and established it- 
self on the far side of that wood. Our men hold the outer 
houses of Gheluvelt. 

The whole of the fighting here was made very difficult by 
the swamps of the Reutelbeek, worse even than those of 
the Hanebeek, through which the New-Zealanders crossed, 
and our English boys were bogged as they tried to cross. 
But they fought forward doggedly, and by sheer valour 
safeguarded our right wing in the hardest part of the bat- 
tle. Meanwhile, far on the north in the district of the Schrei- 
boom astride the Thourout railway, Scottish and Irish 
troops were fighting on a small front but on an heroic scale. 
It was the Dublin Fusiliers who fought most recklessly. 
They had begged to go first into this battle, and they went 
all out with a wild and uxultant spirit. The ground in 
front of them was a mud-pit, and they had to swing round 



396 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

to get beyond it. They did not wait for the barrage. They 
did not halt on their final objective, but still went away into 
the blue, chasing the enemy and uplifted with a strange 
fierce enthusiasm until they were called back to the line we 
wanted to hold. They excelled themselves that morning, 
and could not be held back after the word "Go!" 



20 

The Slough of Despond 

October 9 
Another battle was fought and another advance was made 
by our troops to-day with the French, in a great assault on 
their left. Our Allies gained about 1200 yards of ground 
in two strides, captured some hundreds of prisoners and 
many machine-guns and two field-guns, and killed large 
numbers of the enemy in this attack, and in the bombard- 
ments which have preceded it. The Allied troops are within 
a few hundred yards of that forest of which Marlborough 
spoke when he said, "Whoever holds Houthulst Forest 
holds Flanders," and have gone forward about 1500 yards 
in depth along a line beyond Poelcappelle across the Ypres- 
Gheluvelt road. The enemy has suffered big losses again 
Two new divisions just brought into the line — the 227th 
straight from Rheims only getting into the line at three 
o'clock this morning, and the 195th arrived from Russia — 
have received 'a fearful baptism of fire, and at least three 
other divisions — the i6th, 233rd, and 45th Reserve Divi- 
sion — have been hard hit and are now bleeding from many 
wounds and have given many prisoners from their ranks 
into our hands. 

How was this thing done? How did we have any suc- 
cess to-day when even the most optimistic men were preyed 
upon last night by horrid doubts? Our troops, we know, 
are wonderful. There is nothing they could be asked to do 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 397 

which they would not try to do, and struggle to the death 
to do. But last night's attack might have seemed hopeless 
in the morning except to men who had weighed all the 
chances, who had all the evidence in their hands — evidence, 
I mean, of the measure of the enemy's strength and spirit — 
and who took the terrific responsibility of saying "Go !" to 
the start of this new battle. 

It was a black and dreadful night, raining more heavily 
after heavy rains. The wind howled and raged across 
Flanders with long, sinister wailings as it gathered speed 
and raced over the fields. Heavy storm-clouds hiding the 
moon and the stars broke, and a deluge came down, drench- 
ing all our soldiers who marched along the roads and tracks, 
making ponds about them where they stood. And it was 
cold, with a coldness cutting men with the sharp sword of 
the wind, and there was no glimmer of light in the dark- 
ness. To those of us who know the crater-land of the bat- 
tlefields, who with light kit or no kit have gone stumbling 
through it, picking their way between the shell-holes in 
daylight, taking hours to travel a mile or two, it might 
have seemed impossible that great bodies of troops could 
go forward in assault over such country and win any kind 
of success in such conditions. That they did so is a proof, 
one more proof to add to a thousand others, that our troops 
have in them an heroic spirit which is above the normal 
laws of life, and that, whatever the conditions may be, they 
will face them and grapple with them, and, if the spirit 
and flesh of man can do it, overcome the impossible itself. 
This battle seems to me as wonderful as anything we have 
done since the Highlanders and the Naval Division cap- 
tured Beaumont-Hamel in the mud and the fog. More 
wonderful even than that, because on a greater scale and in 
more foul weather. 

This morning I have been among the Lancashire and 
West Riding men of the 66th and 49th Divisions who lay 
out last night before the attack, which followed the first 
gleams of dawn to-day, and who marched up — no, 'they did 



S98 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

not march, but staggered and stumbled up to take part in 
the attack. These men I met had come back wounded. 
Only in the worst days of the Somme have I seen such 
figures. They were plastered from head to foot in wet 
mud. Their hands and faces were covered with clay, like 
the hands and faces of dead men. They had tied bits of 
sacking round their legs, and this was stuck on them with 
clots of mud. Their belts and tunics were covered with a 
thick, wet slime. They were soaked to the skin, and their 
hair was stiff with clay. They looked to me like men who 
had been buried alive and dug up again, and when I spoke 
to them I found that some of them had been buried alive 
and unburied while they still had life. They told me this 
simply, as if it were a normal thing. "A shell burst close," 
said a Lancashire fellow, "and I was buried up to the neck." 
"Do you mean up to the neck ?" I asked, and he said, "Yes, 
up to the neck." There were many like that, and others, 
without being flung down by a shell-burst or buried in its 
crater, fell up to their waists in shell-holes and up to their 
arm-pits, and sank in water and mud. 

A long column of men whom I knew had to make their 
way up at night to join in the attack at the dawn. I had 
seen them the day before, with rain slashing down on their 
steel hats and their shiny capes, and I thought they were 
as grand a set of lads as ever I have seen in France. They 
were men of the Lancashire battalions in the 66th Division. 

It was at dusk that they set out on their way up to the 
battle-line, and it was only a few miles they had to go. But 
it took them eleven hours to go that distance, and they did 
not get to the journey's end until half an hour before they 
had to attack. It was not a march. It was a long struggle 
against the demons of a foul night on the battlefield. The 
wind blew a gale against them, slapping their faces with 
wet canes, so that their flesh stung as at the slash of whips. 
It buffeted them against each other and clutched at their 
rifles and tried to wrench their packs off their backs. And 
the rain poured down upon them in fierce gusts until they 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 399 

were only dry where their belts crossed, and their boots 
were jfilled with water. It was pitch-dark at the beginning 
of the night, and afterwards there was only the light of 
the stars. They could not see a yard before them, but only 
the dark figure of the man ahead. Often that figure ahead' 
fell suddenly with a shout. It had fallen into a deep shell- 
hole and disappeared. 

"Where are you, Bill?" shouted one man to another. 
"I'm bogged. For God's sake give me a hand, old lad." 

There was not a man who did not fall. "I fell a hundred 
times," said one of them. "It was nigh impossible to keep 
on one's feet for more than a yard or two." 

So that little party of men went stumbling and staggering 
along, trying to work across the shell-holes. 

"My pal Bert," said one man, "fell in deep, and then sank 
farther in. 'Charlie,' he cried. Two of us, and then four, 
tried to drag him out, but we slipped down the bank of the 
crater and rolled into the slime with him. I thought we 
should never get out. Some men were cursing and some 
were laughing in a wild way, and some were near crying 
with the cold. But somehow we got on." 

Somehow they got on, and that is the wonder of it. 
They got on to the line of the attack half an hour before 
the guns were to start their drum-fire, and they joined the 
thousands of other men who had been lying out in the shell- 
holes all night, and were numbed with cold and waist-high 
in water. 

Not all of them got there. The German guns had been 
busy most of the night, and big shells were coming over. 
Thirty men were killed or wounded with one shell, and 
others were hit and fell into the water-pools, and lay there 
till the stretcher-bearers — the splendid stretcher-bearers — 
came up to search for them. 

The Lancashires, who had travelled eleven hours, had had 
no food all that time. "I would have given my left arm 
for a drop of hot drink," said one of them, "I was fair 
perished with cold." 



400 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

Some of them had rum served out to them. They were 
the lucky ones, for it gave them a Httle warmth. But 
others could not get a drop. 

One man, who was shaking with an ague when I met 
him this morning, had a pitiful tragedy happen to him. "I 
had a jar of rum in my pack," he said, "and the boys said 
to me, 'Keep it for us till we get over to the first objective. 
We'll want it most then.' But when I went over I dropped 
my pack. 'Oh, Christ!' I said, 'I've lost the rum!' " 

They went over to the attack, these troops who were cold 
and hungry and exhausted after a dreadful night, and they 
gained their objective and routed the enemy, and sent back 
many prisoners. I marvel at them, and will salute them if 
ever I meet them in the world when the war is done. 

There were a number of German blockhouses in front of 
them, beyond Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel. 
These were Yetta House and Augustus House and Heine 
House on the way to Tober Copse and Friesland Copse just 
outside their line of assault. On their left there was a block- 
house called Peter Pan, though no little mother Wendy 
would tell stories to her boys there, and instead of Peter 
Pan's cockcrow there was the wail of a wounded man. 
Beyond that little house of death were Wolfe Copse and 
Wolfe Farm, from which the fire of German machine-guns 
came swishing in streams of bullets. There was no yard 
of ground without a shell-hole. They were linked together 
like the holes in a honeycomb, and the German troops, very 
thick because of their new method of defence — very dense 
in the support lines though the front line was more lightly 
held — were scattered about in these craters. Large num- 
bers were killed and woimded when our barrage stormed 
over them, but numbers crouching in old craters were left 
alive, and as the barrage passed they rose and came stream- 
ing over in small batches, with their hands high — came to 
meet our men, hoping for mercy. Many prisoners were 
made before the first objective was reached, and after that 
by harder fighting. Some of the men in shell-holes, wet 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 401 

like our men and cold like our men, decided to keep fight- 
ing, and fired their rifles as our lads struggled forward. 
The boy who lost his rum-jar met three of these men in a 
shell-hole, and he threw a bomb at them, and said, "This 
is to pay back for the gas you gave me a month ago." 

A little farther on there was another German in a shell- 
hole. He was a boy of sixteen or so, and he raised his rifle 
at the lad of the rum- jar, who flung the bayonet on one side 
by a sudden blow, but not quick enough to escape a wound 
in the arm. "I couldn't kill him," said the Lancashire lad; 
**he looked such a kid, like. my young brother, so I took 
him prisoner and sent him down." 

Not all the prisoners who were taken came down behind 
our lines. The enemy was barraging the ground heavily, 
and many of their own men were killed, and some of our 
stretcher-bearers, as they came down with the wounded. 
Up in the leafless and shattered trees on the battlefield were 
Germans with machine-guns, and German riflemen who 
sniped our men as they passed. Many of these were shot 
up in the trees and came crashing down. Up on the left 
of the attack, where our troops were in liaison with the 
French, the enemy were taken prisoners in great numbers, 
officers as well as men, and the hostile bombardment was 
not so heavy as on the right, so that the casualties seem 
to have been light there. In spite of the frightful ground 
all the objectives were taken, so that our line has drawn 
close to Houthulst Forest. 

There was heavy fighting by the Worcester s of the 29th 
Division at a place called Pascal Farm, and a lot of con- 
crete dug-outs on the Langemarck-Houthulst road gave 
trouble with their machine-guns. Adler Farm, just out- 
side our old line, somewhat south of that, also held out 
a while, but was mastered, and opened the way to the sec- 
ond objective, which on the right carried the attack through 
Poelcappelle. Here there was hard fighting, by the Lan- 
cashire Fusiliers, South Staffords, and Yorkshires of the 
nth, and the German garrison put up a desperate resist- 



402 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ance in the brewery of Poelcappelle. On the right there 
has been grim fighting again in the old neighbourhood of 
Polderhoek Chateau, but on either side of it our troops of 
the 5th Division have made good progress, in spite of in- 
tense and concentrated fire from many heavy batteries. 
The enemy has again had a great blow, and has lost large 
numbers of men — dead, wounded, and captured. That 
our troops could do this after such a night and over such 
foul ground must seem to the German High Command 
like some black art. 

October 10 
In my message yesterday I described the appalling condi- 
tion of the ground and of the weather through which our 
men floundered in their assault towards Houthulst Forest 
and Passchendaele. That is the theme of this battle, as it 
is told by all the men who have been through its swamps 
and fire, and it is a marvel that any success could have 
been gained. Where we succeeded — and we took a great 
deal of ground and many prisoners — it was due to the sheer 
courage of the men, who refused to be beaten by even the 
most desperate conditions of exhaustion and difficulty; and 
where we failed, or at least did not succeed, in making 
full progress or holding all the first gains, it was because 
courage itself was of no avail against the powers of nature, 
which were in league that night with the enemy's guns. 

The brunt of the fighting fell yesterday in the centre 
upon the troops of North-country England, the hard, tough 
men of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and it was Lancashire's 
day especially, because of those third-line Territorial bat- 
talions of Manchesters and East Lancashires and Lanca- 
shire Fusiliers, with other comrades of the 66th Division. 
There were some amongst them who went "over the bags," 
as they call it, for the first time, and who fought in one of 
the hardest battles that has ever been faced by British 
troops, with most stubborn and gallant hearts. I know 
by hearing from their own lips, to-day and yesterday, the 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 403 

narrative of the sufferings they endured, of the fight /;hey 
made, and of the wounds they bear without a moan. 

The night march of some of these men who went up to 
attack at dawn seems to me, who have written many records 
of brave acts during three years of war, one of the most 
heroic episodes in all this time. It was a march which in 
dry, fine weather would have been done easily enough in 
less than three hours by men so good as these. But it took 
eleven hours for these Lancashire men to get up to their 
support line, and then, worn out by fatigue that was a 
physical pain, wet to the skin, cold as death, hungry, and 
all clotted about with mud, they lay in the water of shell- 
holes for a little while until their officers said, "Our turn, 
boys," and they went forward through heavy fire and over 
the same kind of ground, and fought the enemy with his 
machine-guns and beat him — until they lay outside their last 
objective and kept off counter-attacks by a few machine- 
guns that still remained unclogged, and rifles that somehow 
they had kept dry. Nothing better than that has been done, 
and Lancashire should thrill to the tale of it, because their 
sons were its heroes. Dirty, blood-stained, scarecrow 
heroes, as I met some of them to-day, lightly wounded,, 
but hardly able to walk after the long trail back from 
the line. It was eleven hours' walking on the way up, and 
then, after the wild day and half a night under shell-fire 
and machine-gun fire, eleven hours down again, in shell- 
holes and out of them, falling every few yards, crawling 
on hands and knees through slimy trenches, staggering up 
by the help of a comrade's arm and going on again with set 
jaws, and the cry of "No surrender!" in their soul. . . . 
Gallant men. They had no complaint against the fate that 
had thrust them into this morass, nor any whimper against 
their hard luck. They told of the hard time they had had 
simply and gravely, without exaggeration and without self- 
pity, but as men who had been through a frightful ordeal 
with many thousands of others whose luck was no better 
than theirs and whose duty was the same. They came 



404 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

under severe machine-gun fire from some of the German 
blockhouses, especially on their flanks. Our barrage-fire 
had gone travelling beyond them, and because of the 
swamps and pools it was impossible to keep pace with it. 
Men were lugging each other out of the bogs, rescuing 
each other free from the rain-filled shell-pits. So they lost 
the only protection there is from machine-guns, the screen 
of great belts of gun-fire, and the Germans had time to get 
out of the concrete houses and to get up from the shell- 
holes and fire at our advancing groups of muddy men. 
Many Germans were sniping from these holes, and others 
were up broken trees with machine-guns on small wooden 
platforms. I met one man to-day who had eleven com- 
rades struck down in his own group by one of the snipers. 
A party was detached to search for the German rifleman, 
but they could not find him. They got ahead through Peter 
Pan House and then they had to face another blast of 
machine-gun fire. The German garrison, in a place called 
Yetta House, gave trouble in the same way, and there was 
a nest of machine-guns ahead at Bellevue. Some York- 
shire lads of the 49th Division went up there to route them 
out, but what happened is not yet known. 

All through the day and last night the Lancashire men 
were imder the streaming bullets of a machine-gun bar- 
rage, which whipped the ground about them as fast as 
falling hailstones, so that no man could put his head above 
a shell-hole without getting a bullet through his steel hat. 
I have seen many of those steel hats punctured clean 
through, but with the men who wore them still alive and 
able to smile grimly enough when they pointed to these 
holes. At night the lightly wounded men who tried to get 
back had a desperate time trying to find their way. Some 
of them walked away to the German lines and were up to 
the barbed wire before they found out their mistake. It 
was diflicult to get any sense of direction in the darkness, 
but the German flares helped them. They rose with a very 
bright light, flooding the swamps of No Man's Land with a 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 405 

white glare, revealing the tragedy of the battlefield, where 
many bodies l^y still in the bogs, for many men had been 
killed. Before the darkness German aeroplanes came over, 
as it were, in dense flocks. One Lancashire boy declared 
he counted thirty-seven as he lay looking up to the sky from 
a shell-hole, and they flew low to see where our men had 
made their line. Our stretcher-bearers worked through the 
day and night, but it was hard going even with empty 
stretchers, and they fell and got bogged like the fighting 
men, and many were hit by shell-fire and machine-gun 
bullets. With full stretchers they made their way back 
slowly, and each journey took many hours, and on the way 
they stuck many times in bogs and slipped many times waist- 
deep in shell-holes. The transport and the carriers strug- 
gled with equal courage through the slough of despond, 
trying to get up rations to their cold and hungry comrades 
and ammunition wanted by riflemen and machine-gunners. 
Even in water beyond their belts the men tried to clean their 
rifles and their belts from the mud which had fouled them, 
knowing that later on their lives might depend on this. 
And it is a wonderful thing that some counter-attacks were 
actually repulsed by rifle-fire and by machine-guns, which 
jam if any speck of dirt gets in their mechanism. That 
was on the left, when the Coldstream,, Irish, and Welsh 
Guards and some old county regiments of England — Mid- 
dlesex, Worcesters, Hampshires, Essex — and a gallant lit- 
tle body of Newfoundlanders in the 29th Division had 
fought forward a long way with rapid success. 

The losses of the Guards in going over to the first ob- 
jective were not heavy. They preceded the attack by a 
tremendous trench-mortar bombardment, which so fright- 
ened the enemy and caused such loss among them that be- 
fore the infantry advanced many of them came rushing 
over to our lines to surrender. On the second objective 
there was heavy fighting at a strong place called Strode 
House, which was surrounded with uncut wire and de- 
fended by heavy machine-gun fire. The Guards, after 



406 FROM BAPAXBIE TO PASSCHENDAELE 

being checked, rushed it from all sides and captured it with 
all its garrison. There was more fighting of the same 
kind farther south, at ruins close to Houthulst Forest, on 
the edge of the swamps, which seem to be a No Man's Land, 
because the ground is too wet for the Germans to live 
there. Very quickly after the attack the enemy countered 
heavily on the Guards' left, but the Guards held firm and 
beat it off. 

Farther south the Middlesex, Royal Fusiliers, and the 
Newfoundlanders of the 29th Division went straight 
through to their objective as far as Cinq Chemins Farm 
(the Farm of the Five Roads), and they had to resist a 
series of counter-attacks, starting before half-past eight 
in the morning. The first of these was shattered by rifle- 
fire, and the second by artillery-fire, but afterwards, owing 
no doubt to heavy shelling, our line withdrew a little in front 
of the Poelcappelle road. 

On the left centre of our attack our progress was not 
maintained. The ground here was deplorable, as the two 
streams of the Lekkerbolerbeek and the Stroombeek had 
been cut through by shell-fire, so that their boundaries were 
lost in broad floods. Mortal men could not pass through 
quick enough to keep up with a barrage, and after desper- 
ate struggles they were forced to withdraw from the for- 
ward positions beyond Adler Farm and Burns House. 

Round the village of Poelcappelle, now no more than a 
dust-heap of ruin, there was fierce fighting, and the enemy 
held out in the brewery, from which he swept the ground 
with machine-gun bullets so that all approach was deadly. 
The Yorkshire men of the nth Division here made re- 
peated rushes, but without much success, it seems. 

Meanwhile, on the extreme right of the attack some very 
grim and desperate work was being done by English troops 
of famous old regiments round about Reutel and Polder- 
hoek. At Polderhoek the enemy had a nest of dug-outs and 
machine-gun emplacements behind the chateau, and in spite 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 407 

of the assaults of Warwicks and Norfolks held them by 
unceasing fire. 

On the north of Polderhoek success was complete in the 
attack on Reutel, though the village was defended by 
machine-guns in a cemetery beyond Reutel, and several 
defended blockhouses. These were attacked and taken by 
the H.A.C, Warwicks, and Devons, and our line of objec- 
tives was made good beyond Reutel and Judge Copse, which 
have been thorns in our side — spear-heads rather — for many 
days. 

Splendid and chivalrous work was done on this part of 
the ground by the stretcher-bearers. Out of two hundred 
and fifty labouring in these fields over a hundred were hit, 
and all of them took the utmost risk to rescue their fallen 
comrades in the fighting-lines. The sappers and the pio- 
neers, the transport and the runners, fought not against the 
enemy from Germany, but against an enemy more difficult 
to defeat, and that was the mud. 

21 

The Assaults on Passchendaele 

October 12 
Our troops went forward again to-day farther up the slopes 
of the Passchendaele Ridge, striking north-east towards 
the village of Passchendaele itself, which I saw this morn- 
ing looming through the mist and the white smoke of shell- 
fire, with its ruins like the battlements of a mediaeval castle 
perched high on the crest. 

It has been a day of very heavy fighting, and the su- 
preme success will only be gained by the spirit of men reso- 
lute to win in the face of continual blasts of machine-gun 
bullets, heavy shelling, and weather which has made the 
ground as bad as ever a battlefield has been. The enemy, 
if we may believe what his prisoners say, expected the at- 
tack, and that they did expect it is borne out by the quick- 



408 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

ness with which they dropped down their defensive bar- 
rage, the violent way in which they shelled our back areas 
during the night, and by other unmistakable signs of readi- 
ness. Perhaps the last attack two days ago through the 
wild gale and the mud warned them that not even the ele- 
ments would safeguard them against us, and that our troops, 
who had already achieved something that was next to im- 
possible, would attempt another and greater adventure. 

To me these blows through the mud seem the most dar- 
ing endeavours ever made by great bodies of men. The 
strength of the enemy — and he is very strong still — and the 
courage of the enemy, which is high among his best troops, 
are not the greatest powers which our men are called upon 
to overcome in this latest fighting. Given a good barrage, 
and they are ready to attack his pill-boxes now that we have 
broken the first evil spell of them. But this mud of 
Flanders, these swamps which lie in the way, these nights 
of darkness and rain in the quagmires — those are the real 
terrors which are hardest to win through. Yet our men 
were confident of their fate to-day, and backed each other 
with astoimding courage to take the ground they were 
asked to take; and that pledge which they made between 
their battalions was after that night, now three nights 
ago, when the Lancashire and Yorkshire men made their 
march through the mud which I have described in other 
messages — eleven hours' going before they reached their 
starting-line after frightful tribulations in the darkness and 
before they went into the battle, late for their barrage and 
exhausted in body, but still with the pluck to fight through 
machine-gun fire to their objectives. They did not go as 
far as had been hoped, but they did far more than any' one 
might dare expect in such conditions, and the men in 
to-day's battle depended for success upon the starting-line 
gained for them by those comrades of North-country Eng- 
land. 

The New-Zealanders who went over to-day swore that 
with any luck, or even without luck, they would plant their 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 409 

flag high, and among those men there was a grim, smoulder- 
ing fire of some purpose which boded ill for the enemy 
they should find against them. These are not words of 
rhetoric, to give a little colour to the dark picture of war, 
but the sober truth of what was in those New Zealand 
boys' minds yesterday when they made ready for this new 
battle. 

It was difficult to get the men anywhere near the line of 
attack, owing to the foulness of the groimd. Those who 
were in their positions the night before — that is, on Wednes- 
day night — found that they were not utterly comfortless in 
the sodden fields. By a fine stroke of daring and by the 
great effort of carriers and transport officers, who risked 
their lives in the task, bivouacs were taken up and pegged 
out in the darkness under the very nose of the enemy, so that 
the men should not lie out in the pouring rain, and before 
dawn came they were taken away, in order not to reveal 
these assemblies. There was food also, and hot drink close 
to the fighting-lines, and some of the coldness and horrors 
of the night were relieved. A clear line was made for the 
barrage which would be fired by our guns this morning. 
But some troops had still to go up, and some men had to 
march through the night as those Lancashire men had 
marched up three nights before. They had the same grim 
adventure. They, too, fell into shell-holes, groped their 
way forward blindly in a wild downpour of rain, lugged each 
other out of the bogs, floundered through mud and shell- 
fire from five in the evening until a few minutes only before 
it was time to attack. The enemy was busy with his guns all 
night to catch any of our men who might be on the move. 
He flung down a heavy barrage round about Zonnebeke, 
but by good chance it missed one group of men thereabouts, 
and scarcely touched any of the others in that neighbour- 
hood. But his heavy shells were scattered over a wide area, 
and came bowling through the darkness and exploding with 
great upheavals of the wet earth. Small parties of men 
dodged them as best they could, and pitched into shell-holes 



410 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

five deep in water when they threatened instant death. Then 
gas-shells came whinning, with their queer little puffs, un- 
like the exploding roar of bigger shells, and the wet wind 
was filled with poisonous vapour smarting to the eyes and 
skin, so that our men had to put on their gas-masks and 
walk like that in a worse darkness. These things, and this 
way up to battle, might have shaken the nerves of most 
men, might even have unmanned them and weakened them 
by the fainting sickness of fear. But it only made the 
New-Zealanders angry. It made them angry to the point 
of wild rage. 

"To Hell with them," said some of them. "We won't 
spare them when we go over. We will make them pay for 
this night." They used savage and flaming words, cursing 
the enemy and the weather and the shell-fire and the foul- 
ness of it all. 

I know the state of the ground, for I went over its crater- 
land this morning to look at this flame of fire below the 
Passchendaele spur. I had no heavy kit like the fighting 
men, but fell on the greasy duck-boards as they fell, and 
rolled into the slime as they had rolled. The rain beat a 
tattoo on one's steel helmet. Every shell-hole was brimful 
of brown or greenish water; moisture rose from the earth 
in a fog. Our guns were firing everywhere through the 
mist and thrust sharp little swords of flame through its 
darkness, and all the battlefields bellowed with the noise of 
these guns. I walked through the battery positions, past 
enormous howitzers which at twenty paces distance shook 
one's bones with the concussion of their blasts, past long 
muzzled high velocities, whose shells after the first sharp 
hammer-stroke went whinnying away with a high fluttering 
note of death, past the big-bellied nine-point-twos and mon- 
sters firing lyddite shells in clouds of yellow smoke. Before 
me stretching away round the Houthulst Forest, big and 
dark and grim, with its close-growing trees, was the Pass- 
chendaele Ridge, the long, hummocky slopes for which our 
men were fighting, and our barrage-fire crept up it, and in- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 411 

femal shell-fire, rising in white columns, was on the top of 
it, hiding the broken houses there until later in the morning, 
when the rain ceased a little, and the sky was streaked with 
blue, and out of the wet gloom Passchendaele appeared, 
with its houses still standing, though all in ruins. There 
were queer effects when the sun broke through. Its rays ran 
down the wet trunks and the forked naked branches of dead 
trees with a curious, dazzling whiteness, and all the swamps 
were glinting with light on their foul waters, and the pack- 
mules winding along the tracks, slithering and staggering 
through the slime, had four golden bars on either side of 
them when the sun shone on their i8-pounder shells. There 
was something more ghastly in this flood of white light over 
the dead ground of the battlefields, revealing all the litter of 
human conflict round the captured German pill-boxes, than 
when it was all under black storm-clouds. 

It was at the side of a pill-box famous in the recent fight- 
ing that I watched the progress of our barrage up the 
slopes of Passchendaele, and it was only by that fire and 
by the answering fire of the German guns with blacker 
shell-bursts that one could tell the progress of our men. 

"How's it going?" asked a friend of two officers of the 
Guards who came down the duck-boards from Poelcappelle 
way. 

"Pretty well," was the answer. "We have cut off four 
Boche guns with our barrage, though we only had a little 
way to go — on the left, you know." 

"Big fellows?" 

"No, pip-squeak. The usual seventy-seven." 

It seemed that there had been a check on the left. Our 
men had come up against abominable machine-gun fire. On 
the right things were doing better. Our line was being 
pushed up close to Passchendaele, within a few hundred 
yards or so. Some prisoners were coming down — there had 
been a lot of bayonet fighting, and a lot of killing. The 
wounded are getting back already, most of them with ma- 
chine-gun wounds, the worst of them with shell wounds. 



413 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

The New-Zealanders had hardly gone over before Ger- 
man flares rose to call on the guns. The guns did not an- 
swer for some little while; but instantly there was the 
chattering fire of many machine-guns; and from places 
above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and all the length of the 
Goudberg spur of the Passchendaele, where there were 
many blockhouses and concrete streets, there was poured out 
a sweeping barrage of bullets. 

Our men, advancing on all sides of the Passchendaele 
Ridge and right up to the edge of Houthulst Forest, were 
everywhere checked a while by the swampy ground. The 
streams, or beeks, that intersect this country, like the Lek- 
kerbolerbeek-and the Ravelbeek, had lost all kind of bounds, 
and by the effect of shell-fire had flowed out into wide bogs. 
Here and there the men crossed more easily, and that led 
to some parts of the line getting farther forward then others 
and so to being enfiladed on the right or left. It is on the 
left that we have had most difficulty, roimd about Wolfe 
Copse and Marsh Bottom. On the right it is reported that 
some of the Anzacs have been seen going up across the 
slopes of Crest Farm, which is some 500 yards from Pas- 
schendaele village, on the heights of the ridge. At the pres- 
ent time it is impossible to tell more about this battle than 
to say it is being fought desperately. Our airmen are un- 
able to bring back exact news owing to the darkness whicK 
has again descended, and all that is known so far is tha£ 
our men are making progress in spite of the deadly ma- 
chine-gun fire against them, and that they are resolute to 
go on. The enemy is fighting hard, and his Jaegers, with 
green bands round their caps, and the men of the 223rd 
Reserve Division, have not surrendered easily, though 
many of them are now our prisoners. It is raining again 
heavily, and the mists have deepened. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 4.1S 

22 

Round Poelcappelle 

October 14 
To-day there was a fine spell, though yesterday, after Fri- 
day's battle, it was still raining, and looked as if it might 
rain until next April or March. Our soldiers cursed the 
weather, cursed it with deep and lurid oaths, cursed it wet 
and cursed it cold, by day and by night, by duck-boards and 
mule-tracks, by shell-holes and swamps, by Ravelbeek and 
Broenbeek and Lekkerbolerbeek. For it was weather which 
robbed them of victory on Friday and made them suffer 
the worst miseries of winter warfare, and held them in the 
mud when they had set their hearts upon the heights. It 
was the mud which beat them. Man after man has said 
that to me on the day of battle and yesterday. 

"Fritz couldn't have stopped us," said an Australian boy, 
warming his hands and body by a brazier after a night in 
the cold slime, which was still plastered about him. "It was 
the mud which gave him a life chance." 

"It was the mud that did us in," said an officer of the 
Berkshires, sitting up on a stretcher and speaking wearily. 
"We got bogged and couldn't keep up with the barrage. 
That gave the German machine-gunners time to get to work 
on us. It was their luck." 

A young Scottish Borderer, shivering so that his teeth 
chattered, spoke hoarsely, and there was no warmth in 
him except the fire in his eyes. "We had a fearful time," 
he said, "but it was the spate of mud that kept us back, and 
the Germans took advantage of it." 

"Whenever we got near to Fritz he surrendered or ran," 
said a young sergeant of the East Surreys, "We should 
have had him beat with solid ground beneath us, but we all 
got stuck in the bog, and he came out of his blockhouses 
and machine-gunned us as we tried to get across the shell- 



414 FROM BAPAUME T.O PASSCHENDAELE 

holes, all filled like young ponds, and sniped us when we 
could not drag one leg after the other." 

No proof is needed of the valour of our men. It is idle 
to speak of it, because for three years they have shown 
the height of human courage in the most damnable and 
deadly places. But I have known nothing finer in this 
war than the quality of the talk I have heard among the 
men who fought all Friday after a night exposure in wild 
rain, and lay out all that night in water-pools under gun- 
fire, and came back again yesterday wounded, spent, bloody 
and muddy, cramped and stiff, cold to the marrow-bones, 
and tired after the agony of the long trail back across the 
barren fields. They did not despair because they had not 
gained all they had hoped to gain. "We'll get it all right 
next time," said man after man among them. They all 
stated the reasons for their bad luck. 

"If you step off a duck-board you go squelch up to the 
knees, and handling them big shells is no joke. All that 
means delay in getting up ammunition." This was from a 
young soldier who had been flung 50 yards and senseless 
away from a group of comrades who were all killed by a 
big shell-burst. His senses had come back, and a quiet, 
shrewd judgment of all he had seen and his old faith that 
our men can win through every time if they have equal 
chances with the enemy. That faith, that confidence in their 
o^vn fighting quality, was not dimmed because on F..day 
they did not go far. The fire of it, the beauty of it, .he 
simplicity of it shone in the eyes of these men, who were 
racked by aches and shot through with pain, all beiouled 
by the mud, which was in the very pores of their skin, and 
seared by remembrances of tragic things. To command 
soldiers like that should be the supreme joy of their officers, 
aad indeed there is not one of our officers who does not 
think so, and is not proud of them with a pride that is 
full of comradeship for his good company. Napoleon's 
Old Guard was not of better stuff than these boys from Eng- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 415 

lish farms and factories, Scottish homesteads, Australian 
and New Zealand sheep- farm runs. 

In these recent battles home troops and overseas troops 
have been mixed together in the mud of battlefields, and they 
come down together out of the shell-fire to field dressing- 
stations, waiting to have their wounds dressed and telling 
their tales of the fighting. There is no difference there be- 
tween them. They are all figures carved out of the same 
clay, with faces and hands of the tint of clay, like men 
risen out of wet graves. A moist steam rises from them 
as they group round the braziers, and they know each 
other — Australian and English lad, Scot and Welsh, Irish, 
New-Zealander — as comrades who have taken the same 
risks, suffered the same things, escaped from death by the 
same kind of miracle. They talk in low voices. There is 
no bragging among them; no wailing; no excited talk. 
Quietly they tell each other of the things that happened to 
them and of the things they saw, and it is the naked truth, 
idle sometimes as truth itself. So when they say, as I heard 
them say yesterday, "It is all right, it was only the mud 
that checked us," one knows that this is truth in the hearts 
of brave men, the truth of the fine faith that is in them. 

I told in my last message how the enemy was ready for 
attack and tried to prevent it, before it started, by violent 
shelling over our back areas, all through Thursday night, 
mixing his high explosives with gas-shells and trying to 
catch our men on the move and our batteries deep in the 
mud. It is certain that his aeroplanes, flying low through 
mists, saw great traffic behind the lines and the work of 
thousands of men laying down new tracks and getting for- 
ward with supplies. That could not be hidden from them. 
We did not try to hide it, but worked in the daylight under 
the eyes of their observers in Passchendaele and in Crest 
Farm below it, and on the high ground above Poelcappelle, 
so that they could see the tide of all this energy when the 
gunners, pioneers, engineers, transports drivers, mule 
leaders, and the long winding columns of troops surged up 



416 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the arteries of the battlefields and choked them about the 
Piccadilly Circus of the crater-land. 

It was a supreme defiance of the enemy's power, a chal- 
lenge louder than any herald's trumpet announcing the be- 
ginning of a new battle. The enemy accepted the chal- 
lenge, though not, as we know, with any gladness of heart. 
Behind his lines there was disorder and dismay, and his 
organization had been horribly strained by the rapid series 
of blows which had fallen on him and by his great losses. 
His local reserves had been flung together anyhow, to meet 
the pressure we had put upon him. Remnants of battalions 
were mixed up with other remnants, and our prisoners are 
from many units. These divisions of his which have 
withstood the brunt of this recent fighting, like the 195th 
and the i6th and the 227th, were horribly mauled and 
broken, and other divisions coming up to relieve them were 
caught by our long-range guns far back from the lines, 
and lost their way in the swamps which are on their side 
of the battlefield as well as on ours, and struggled forward 
in the darkness and shell-fire to positions hard to find by 
troops new to this ground. Their High Command issued 
new orders hurriedly, and made desperate efforts to 
strengthen their lines. They put up new apron-wire de- 
fences around their blockhouses. All the heavy machine- 
guns of the supporting troops were sent forward to the front 
lines to reinforce those already in position in their block- 
houses and organized shell-holes between the blockhouses 
and the narrow streets of concrete. Never before did the 
enemy mass so many machine-guns on his front for continu- 
ous barrage over a wide region, and to defend the last spurs 
of Passchendaele. He had machine-guns up trees as well 
as on the ground, and he scattered his riflemen among the 
shell-craters with orders to shoot until they were killed or 
captured. 

It is fair to these men to say that they obeyed their orders 
and fought on Friday with most fierce courage. It was 
only here and there that small bodies of German troops, 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 417 

caught in our barrage and nerve-broken by the long agony 
of lying in water under a ceaseless shell-fire, ran forward to 
our men as soon as the first brown lines appeared out of the 
mud and surrendered. The men behind the machine-guns 
opened fire at the moment of attack, and it was the noise of 
this light artillery, the longdrawn swish of its bullets whip- 
ping the ground, and a devil's tattoo of groups of machine- 
guns hidden up the slopes, that broke upon our men as soon 
as they began to make their way through the mud. 

I have already told how many of our men had spent the 
night. Large bodies of them had lain out since Wednesday. 
Of these some had been luckier than others, getting hot 
drink and food and shelter under tarpaulin tents which did 
not keep them dry, but kept off the full force of the beating 
rains. Others, not so lucky, had to lie in shell-holes half 
full, or quite full, of ice-cold water, and rations had gone 
astray, as many ration parties could not get up through 
the hostile barrage or were bogged somewhere down be- 
low; and for some men at least there was not the usual 
drop of rum to warm the "cockles of their hearts" and to 
bring back a little glow of life to their poor numbed limbs. 
Other men had spent the night in marching, spurred on by 
the hateful fear of being too late to take their place in the 
battle-line, so that their comrades would not have their 
help, but spurred to no quickness because every yard of 
ground had its obstacle and its ditch, and it was a crawl 
all the way, with many slips and falls and shouts for help. 

It was pitch-dark, and the rain beat against these men, 
driven by the savage wind, plucking at their capes, buffet- 
ing their steel helmets, straining at the straps of their 
packs, slashing them across the face. There boots squelched 
deep in the mud and made a queer, sucking noise as these 
single files of dark figures went shuffling across along slimy 
duckboards, a queer noise which I heard when I went up 
with some of them on the morning of the battle over duck- 
board tracks. Some of them lost the duck-boards and went 
knee-deep into bogs, and waist-deep into shell-holes, and 



418 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

neck-deep into swamps. In spite of all the frightfulness of 
the night, the coldness, the weariness, and the beastliness of 
this flomidering in mud and shell-fire, they went forward 
into the battle with grim, set faces, and attacked the places 
from which the machine-gun fire came in blasts. The New- 
Zealanders attacked many blockhouses and strong points 
immediately in front of their first objective on the left above 
the Ypres-Roulers railway, and on the way to the marsh 
bottom and rising slope of the Goudberg spur, where at 
Bellevue the enemy's machine-guns were thickly clustered. 

Below that, by Heine House and Augustus, the Australian 
troops were trying to work their way forward to the hum- 
mock of Crest Farm, barring the way to Passchendaele, and 
up on the left centre, from the cross-roads and cemetery 
of Poelcappelle, the Scottish and English battalions — 
Berkshires, East Surreys, West Kents, and others — as- 
saulted the brewery, which has been captured twice and 
twice lost, and a row of buildings in heaps of ruin on the 
Poelcappelle road, which the Germans use as cover for 
their machine-gunners. Many of these outposts were cap- 
tured by groups. Our men worked round them and rushed 
them, in spite of the streams of bullets which pattered 
around them so that many fell in the first attempts. Here 
and there the enemy fought fiercely to the last, and fell un- 
der the bayonets of our men. Here and there, in the open 
ground to the right of Poelcappelle and on the ground be- 
low Passchendaele, batches of German soldiers made little 
fight, but came rushing out of their holes with their hands 
up, terror-stricken. 

But machin&-gun fire never ceased from the higher 
ground, from tall masts of branchless trees, from shell- 
craters beyond the reach of our men. Our barrage travelled 
ahead, and slow as it was I saw it creeping up the lower 
slopes of the Passchendaele ridge for the second objective 
on Friday morning — our men could not keep pace with it. 
They were stuck in the swamps at Marsh Bottom in the 
Lekkerbolerbeek below Poelcappelle and in the bogs below 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 419 

Crest Farm. They plunged into these bogs, fiercely cursing 
them, struggling to get through them to the enemy, but the 
men could do nothing with their legs held fast in such 
slime, nothing but shout to comrades to drag them out. 
While they struggled German snipers shot at them with a 
cool aim, and the machine-gun bullets of the deadly barrage 
lashed across the shell-craters. 

Australian troops on the right made good and reached 
the edge of the hummock called Crest Farm. Some of them 
swarmed up it and fought and killed the garrison there, 
but beyond was another knoll with machine-gunners and 
riflemen, and as our men came up to the top of Crest Farm 
they were under close and deadly fire. They would have 
held their ground here if they could have been supported 
on the left, but the New-Zealanders were having a terrible 
time in Marsh Bottom and Bcllevue, and could not make 
much headway because of the deadly fire which came down 
from the spur on which Bellevue is perched. All this 
time it was raining hard, making the ground worse than be- 
fore, and the wet mists deepened, preventing all visibility 
for our machines working with the guns. Orders were 
given not to continue the second stage of the attack, be- 
cause the weather was too bad, and the Australians on the 
right centre withdrew their line in order not to have an 
exposed flank. In the afternoon the enemy's heavy artillery, 
which had been very hesitating and uncertain during the 
first stages of the attack, began to barrage the ground in- 
tensely, and continued this fire all the night. 

Meanwhile close and fierce fighting was all about Poelcap- 
pelle. English and Scottish troops entered the ruins of the 
village, in spite of the waves of machine-gun bullets which 
girdled it, drove the Germans out of the brewery buildings 
for a time, fought their way among the brick-heaps and 
ruined houses, killed many men who held out there, and 
with bayonet and rifle defended themselves against counter- 
attacks which came down the Poelcappelle road. It was as 
savage and desperate fighting as any episode in this war 



420 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

at close quarters, without mercy on either side, one man's 
life for another's. Our men were reckless and fierce. They 
fought in small parties, with or without officers. Ground 
was gained and lost by yards, and men fought like wild 
beasts across the broken walls and ditches and shell-craters 
which go by the name of Poelcappelle. It was five o'clock in 
the evening that another strong counter-attack by the enemy 
came down Poelcappelle road and drove in our advanced 
posts. The brewery then became a sort of No Man's Land 
— an empty shell between opposing sides. Our men were 
spent after all that night and day in the mud and all this 
fighting, and now dusk was creeping down, and it was 
hard to see who was friend and who was enemy among the 
figures that crawled about in the slime. 

It was the turn for stretcher-bearers, those men who 
work behind the fighting-lines and then come to gather up 
the human wreckage off it. With great heroism they had 
worked all day under heavy fire, and now went on work- 
ing without thought of self. They were visible to the 
enemy, and their Red Cross armlets showed their mission. 
Away on the slopes of Passchendaele his stretcher-bearers 
could be seen working too. One body of 200 men came 
out, waving the Red Cross flag, with stretchers and am- 
bulances, and went gleaning in these harvest-fields, and no 
shot of ours went over to them. But on our side shots 
from German snipers were still flying and our stretcher- 
bearers were hit. Three of them carrying one stretcher 
were killed, and the officer with them directing this work 
near Poelcappelle was fired with a flame of anger. He 
► seized a Red Cross flag and made his way very quickly 
over the shell-holes towards the enemy's position, and 
standing there, this officer of the R.A.M.C. shouted out a 
speech which rang high above the noise of gun-fire and all 
the murmur of the battlefield. 1 

Perhaps what he said was quite incoherent and wild. 
Perhaps no man who heard him could understand a word 
of what he said, but there in the shell-holes hidden from 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 421 

him in the mud were listening men with loaded rifles, and 
they may have raised their heads to look at that single figure 
with the flag. They understood what he meant. His ac- 
cusing figure was a message to them. After that there 
was no deliberate sniping of stretcher-bearers, though they 
still had to go through shell-fire. It was hard on the 
wounded that night. The lightly wounded made their 
way back as best they could, and it was a long way back, 
and a dark way back over that awful ground. God knows 
how they managed it, these men with holes in their legs 
and mangled arms and bloody heads. They do not know. 

"I thought I should never get back," said many of them 
yesterday. "It was bad enough going up, when we were 
strong and fit. At the end of the journey we could hardly 
drag our limbs along to get near the enemy. But coming 
down was worse." 

They fell not once but many times, they crawled through 
the slime and then fell into deep pits of water with slippery 
sides, so that they could hardly get out. They lay down in 
the mud and believed they must die, but some spark of 
vitality kept alive in them, and a great desire for life 
goaded them to make another effort to go another hun- 
dred yards. They cried out incoherently, and heard other 
cries around them, but were alone in some mud-track of 
these battlefields with a great loneliness of the soul. One 
man told me of his night like that, told me with strange 
smiling eyes that lightened up the mud mask of his face 
under a steel hat that was like an earthenware pot on his 
head. All the time he opened and shut his hands very 
slowly and carefully, and looked at them as things separate 
from himself. They had become quite dead and white in 
the night, and were now getting back to life and touch from 
the warmth of a brazier over which he crouched. 

"I crawled a thousand yards or so," he said, "and 
thought I was finished. I had no more strength than a 
baby, and my head was all queer and dizzy-like, so that I 
had uncommon strange thoughts and saw things that 



422 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

weren't there. The shells kept coming near me, and the 
noise of them shook inside my head so that it went funny. 
For a long time while I lay there I thought I had my 
chums all round me, and that made me feel a kind of com- 
fortable. I thought I could see them lying in the mud all 
round with just their shoulders showing humped up and 
the tops of their packs covered in mud. I spoke to them 
sometimes and said, 'Is that you, Alf ?' or 'Come a bit 
nearer, mate.' It didn't worry me at first because they 
didn't answer, I thought they were tired. But presently 
something told me I was all wrong. Those were mud-heaps, 
not men. Then I felt frightened because I was alone. It 
was a great, queer kind of fear that got hold of me, and I 
sat up and then began to crawl again just to get into touch 
with company, and I went on till daylight came and I saw 
other men crawling out of shell-holes and some of them 
walking and holding on to each other. So we got back to- 
gether." 

They came back to the field dressing-stations, where 
there was warmth for them and hot drinks, and clean 
bandages for their wounds; and groups of men, who had 
fought with the same courage, and now, in spite of all they 
had endured, spoke brave words, and said it was not the 
enemy that had checked them but only the mud. Their 
spirit had not been beaten, for no hardships in the world 
will ever break that. 

But while I was talking with these men a figure came and 
sat on a bench among them speechless, because no one un- 
derstood his tongue. It was a wounded German prisoner, 
and I saw from his shoulder-strap that he belonged to the 
233rd Regiment of the 119th Division. Among all these 
men of ours who spoke with a fine hopefulness of what they 
would do next time he was hopeless. "We are lost," he 
said. "My division is ended. My friends are all killed." 
When asked what his officers thought, he made a queer 
gesture of derision, with one finger under his nose when 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 423 

he says '*Zut." "They think we are 'kaput' too; they only 
look to the end of the war." 

"And when do they think that will come?" He said, 
"God willing, before the year ends." 

In civilian life he was a worker in an ammunition fac- 
tory at Thuringen, by the Black Forest. He had seen many 
English there, and never thought he should fight against 
them one day. His father, who is forty-seven, is in the 
war. He himself looked a man of that age — old and worn, 
with a week's beard on his chin ; but when I asked him his 
age he replied, "I am twenty-one. Last night I was twenty- 
one, when I lay after three days in a shell-hole — ['ein 
granatenloch'] — and your men helped me out because I was 
wounded." 

"What do you think of our men?" he was asked, and 
he said, "They are good. Your artillery is good. It is 
very bad for us. We are 'kaput.' " 

On one side of the fire were the men who think they are 
winning, whatever checks they may have, and who always 
attack with that faith in their hearts. On the other side 
was the man who said "We are finished," and sat huddled 
up in despair. All of them had suffered the same things. 

To-day the sky is clear again, and the pale gold of au- 
tumn sunlight lies over the fields, and all the woods be- 
hind the fines are clothed in russet foliage. It is two days 
late, this quiet of the sky, and if Friday had been fike this 
there would have been a flag of ours on the northern 
heights of Passchendaele Ridge. But still the gunners go 
on with their toil, those wonderful gunners of ours, who 
get very little sleep and very little rest and go down for an 
hour or two into a hole in the earth in those sodden fields 
where all day long and all night there is the tumult of 
bombardment. Piles of shells lie on the ground, heaps 
around them, and behind men are labouring to bring up 
more; and across the battlefields, strangely close to the 
actual fighting-line, black trains go steaming along rails 
which hundreds of men have risked their lives to lay a hun- 



424 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

dred yards, so that the guns shall be fed and the gunners 
have no respite. On the left of the line there is blue among 
the brown of our armies, and on the morning of the battle I 
saw French limbers and transport wagons using the same 
tracks as our own, and heard the rattle of the ''soixante- 
quinze" again below Houthulst Forest, where there are still 
leaves on the trees and the beauty of a dense yellowing 
foliage is there beyond all those other woods where there 
are only fangs and stumps of trees in the fields where our 
men have fought. 

October 23 

The fighting yesterday east of Poelcappelle and on the 
right of the French by Houthulst Forest across the Ypres- 
Staden railway showed a curious inequality in the strength 
and determination of the German defence. The French 
themselves had easy going, swinging up from Jean Bart 
House across some trench works and through a cluster of 
blockhouses. The German artillery-fire was slight against 
them, so that their losses are very few — though they 
were held a while in the centre by machine-gun fire — and it 
seems likely that the French gas-shells, fired over the 
enemy's batteries before the attack, had had a paralysing 
effect on some of the German gunners. Whatever the cause, 
there was a strange absence of high explosives, and the 
line was not thickly held by the men of the 40th Division, 
who have lately come from Russia. One officer and a score 
of men were captured, and a number of dead lie about the 
blockhouses, killed by the French bombardment. The 
others fled into the forest. Behind them they left two 
field-guns. 

East of Poelcappelle and on the right of our attack the 
German infantry were also weak in their resistance, and 
our men of the Norfolk and Essex Regiments who ad- 
vanced hereabouts did not have much trouble with them at 
close quarters. What trouble there was came from a ma- 
chine-gun barrage farther back, which whipped over the 
shell-craters and whistled about the ears of our assault- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 425 

ing troops. The heavy gunning that we have put over this 
ground for more than a week, with special concentration 
on strong points Hke the ruined brewery outside the scrap- 
heap village of Poelcappelle and the other blockhouses, had 
made this area a most unhealthy neighbourhood for German 
garrisons, and they had withdrawn some of their strength 
to safer lines, leaving small outposts, with orders to hold 
out at all costs — orders easy to give and hard to obey in 
the case of men dejected and shaken by a long course of 
concussion and fear. 

A Bavarian division, the Fifth Bavarian Reserve, had 
been living in those pill-boxes and shell-holes until two 
nights ago, and whatever the German equivalent may be of 
"fed up" they were that to the very neck. Some of our Suf- 
folk and Berkshire boys had taken prisoners among these 
Bavarians on days and nights before the attack, and these 
men made no disguise of their disgust at their conditions 
of life. Like other Bavarians taken elsewhere, they com- 
plained that they were being made catspaws of the Prus- 
sians, and put into the hottest parts of the line to save 
Prussian skins. Some of the Bavarian battalions have had 
an epidemic of desertion to the back areas, in the spirit of 
"I want to go home." A fortnight ago there was a case of 
thirteen men who set off for home. A few of them actually 
reached Nuremberg, and others were arrested at Ghent. 

One strange and gruesome sign of trouble behind the 
German firing-lme was found by one of our Cameronlans 
the other day after an advance. It was a German officer 
bound and shot. Opposite Poelcappelle the German Com- 
mand thought it well to pull out the 5th Bavarian Reserve 
and replace them two nights ago by Marines of the 3rd 
Naval Division, who are stout fellows, whatever their 
political opinions may be after the recent mutiny at Wil- 
helmshaven, from which some of them have come. On' our 
left centre yesterday they fought hard and well, with quick 
counter-attacks, but opposite Poelcappelle they did not re- 
sist in the same way and did not come back yesterday to 



426 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

regain the ground taken by our men of the Eastern 
Counties. 

The Norfolk and Essex battalions had to make their 
way over bad ground. In spite of a spell of dry weather 
one night of rain had been enough to turn it all to sludge 
again and to fill and overflow the shell-holes, which had 
never dried up. The Lekkerbolerbeek has become a marsh 
waist-deep for men, not so much by rain-storms as by shell- 
storms which have torn up its banks and slopped its water 
over the plain. Before the attack yesterday morning our 
air photographs taken in very low flights showed the sort 
of ground our men would have to cross. Everywhere the 
shell-craters show up shinily in the aerial photographs, 
with their water reflecting the light like silver mirrors. 
Higher up there are floods about Houthulst Forest extend- 
ing to the place where the enemy keeps his guns behind 
the protection of the water, and no lack of rain-filled shell- 
holes on each side of the Ypres-Staden railway. 

Bad going; but our battalions went well, keeping close to 
their whirlwind barrage of fire and keeping out of the 
water-pits as best they could, and scrambling up again when 
they fell over the slimy ground. Manchesters and Lan- 
cashire Fusiliers, Cheshires, Gloucesters, and Royal Scots; 
Northumberland Fusiliers, Suffolks and Norfolks, Essex 
and Berkshires — how good it is to give those good old names 
— went forward yesterday morning in the thick white mist, 
and took all the ground they had been asked to take 
whether it was hard or easy. It was hardest to take, and 
hardest 'to hold, on the right of Houthulst Forest and on 
the left of the "Ypres-Staden railway. Here the enemy 
held his line in strength, and protected it with a fierce 
machine-gun barrage and enfilade fire from many bat- 
teries which were quick to get into action. 

Houthulst Forest, in spite of all the gas that has soak:ed 
it, was full of German troops of the 26th Reserve Divi- 
sion, under stem orders to defend it to the death, with an- 
other division in support, and the Marines on their right. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDEKS 427 

They had many concrete emplacements in the cover of the 
forest, from which they were able to get their machine- 
guns into play, and along the Staden railway there were 
blockhouses not yet destroyed by our bombardment, which 
were strongholds from which they were not easily routed. 
There was hard fighting by the Royal Scots for some huts 
along the railway, and after holding them they had to with- 
draw in the face of a heavy counter-attack, which the 
enemy at once sent down the line. Elsewhere the Man- 
chesters had a similar experience, coming under heavy 
cross-fire and then meeting the thrust of German storm 
troops. They and the Lancashire Fusiliers behaved with 
their usual fine courage, and were slow to give ground at 
one or two points, where they were forced to draw back 
two hundred yards or so. The Cheshires and the Glouces- 
ters were severely tried, but the Gloucesters especially held 
out yesterday in an advanced position, with the most reso- 
lute spirit against fierce attacks and great odds, and still 
hold their ground. At daybreak to-day, after all the ex- 
haustion of yesterday and a cold wet night and heavy 
fire over them, they met another attack, shattered it, and 
took twenty prisoners. That is a feat of courage which 
only men out here who have gone through such a day and 
night — and there are many thousands of them — can properly 
understand and admire. It is the courage of men tried to 
the last limit of human will-power and sustained by some 
burning fire of the spirit in their coldness and their weari- 
ness. The Northumberland Fusiliers, at another part of 
the line, and the Cheshires and Lancashire Fusiliers dug in 
round an old blockhouse, using their rifles to break up the 
bodies of Germans who tried to force through. At night, 
or rather at eight o'clock last evening, when it was quite 
dark, the enemy regained a post, but could do no more than 
that, and it was a small gain. On the whole the progress 
made yesterday was good, and considering the state of the 
ground, still our greatest trouble, was a splendid feat of 



428 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

arms by those men of the old county regiments who are 
given the honour they deserve by pubHc mention. 

The enemy losses were heavy. All last week they were 
heavy, owing to the ceaseless fire of our guns, and the dead 
that lie about the ground of this new advance, to a thou- 
sand yards in depth, show that his men have suffered. 



23 

The Canadians Come North 

October 26 
Once ag'ain our troops, English and Canadians, have at- 
tacked in rain and mud and mist. It is the worst of all 
combinations for attack, and during the last three months, 
even on the dreadful days in August never to be forgotten 
by Irish battalions and Scots, they have known that com- 
bination of hostile forces not once but many times, when 
victory more complete than the fortune of war has given us 
yet, though we have had victories of real greatness, hung 
upon the moisture in the clouds and the difference between 
a few hours of sunshine and the next storm. 

To-day our men of the 5th Division have again attacked 
Polderhoek Chateau, the scene of many fights before, and 
taken many prisoners from that 400 men of four German 
Companies who were its garrison, holding the high ruins 
which looked down into swamps through which our men 
had to wade. They have fought their way to the vicinity of 
Gheluvelt. This ground is sacred to the memory of the 
British soldiers .who fought and died there three years ago. 
One of our airmen, flying low through the mist and rain- 
squalls, is reported to have seen Germans running out of 
Gheluvelt Chateau, a huddle of broken walls now after this 
three years' war, and escaping down the Menin road. 
Nothing is very definite as I write from that part of the line, 
as nothing can be seen through the darkness of the storm and 
few messages come back out of the mud and mist. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 429 

Northwards the Canadians have taken many "pill-boxes" 
and an uncounted number of prisoners — not easily, not 
without tragic difficulties to overcome in the valleys of those 
miserable beeks, which have been spilt into swamps, and up 
the slopes of the Passchendaele spur, such as Bellevue, with 
its concrete houses which guard the way to the crest. 

North still, beyond Poelcappelle, whether the Broen- 
beek and the Watervlietbeek intermingle their filthy waters 
below two spurs, which are thrust out from the main ridge 
like the horns of a bull, south of Houthulst Forest, bat- 
talions of the London Regiment with Artists Rifles and 
Bedfords have attacked the enemy in his stone forts through 
his machine-gun barrages and have sent back some of their 
garrisons and struggled forward up the slopes of mud 
in desperate endeavour. And on the left of us this morn- 
ing the French made an advance where all advance seemed 
fantastic except for amphibious animals, through swamps 
thigh-deep for tall men. This was west of a place falsely 
named Draeibank, and surrounded by deeper floods, which 
would have made the most stalwart "Poilus" sink up to 
their necks, and, with their packs on, drown. It was no 
good going into that, though on the right edge of the deep 
waters some French companies waded through and took 
a blockhouse, with a batch of prisoners and machine-guns. 

West of Draeibank there were several blockhouses, but 
their concrete had been smashed under the French bombard- 
ments, and those Germans who had not been killed fled be- 
hind the shelter of the waters. Their barrage of gun-fire 
fell heavily soon after the attack began by the French, 
but for the most part into the floods which our "Poilu" 
friends did not try to cross, so that they jeered at these 
water-spouts ahead of them. 

Our troops had a longer way to go and a worse way, and 
it has been a day of hard fighting in most miserable con- 
ditions. Their glory is that they have done these things I 
have named on such a day. The marvel is to me that they 
were able to make any kind of attack over such ground as 



430 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

this. In those vast miles of slime there has been from six 
o'clock this morning enough human heroism, suffering, and 
sacrifice to fill an epic poem and the eyes of the world with 
tears. It is wonderful what these men of ours will do. But 
in telling their tale they smile a little grimly in remembrance, 
or say just simply : "It was hell !" 

There is more in a battle than fighting. What goes be- 
fore it to make ready for the hour of attack is as vital, and 
demands as much, perhaps a little more, courage of soul. 
Before this battle there was much to be done, and it was 
hard to do. Guns had to be moved, not far, but moved, 
and out of one bog into another bog — those monsters of 
enormous weight, which settle deeply into the slime. To 
be in time for this morning's barrage, gunners, already 
worn, craving sleep and silence, dog-weary of mud and 
noise after weeks and months of great battles, had to 
work like Trojans divinely inspired to win another day's 
victory, and they spurred themselves harder than their 
horses in this endeavour. They were often under shell- 
fire. Not only the gunners, but all the transport men, all 
the pioneers and working parties have done their utmost. 
Battalions of fighting men, busy not with their rifles but 
with shovels and duck-boards, worked in the mud — ^mud 
baulking all labour, swallowing up logs, boards, gun-wheels, 
shells, spades, and the legs of men, the slime and filthy 
water slopping over all the material of war urgently wanted 
for this morning's "show." The enemy tried to harass the 
winding teams of pack-mules staggering forward under a 
burden of ammunition boxes, rations, every old thing that 
men want if they must fight. Those mule leaders and trans- 
port men do not take a lower place than the infantry who 
went away to-day. They took as many risks, and squared 
their jaws to the ordeal of it all like those other men. The 
fighting troops went marching up or driving up in the rain. 
Far behind the Front the roads were filled with dense surg- 
ing traffic, which we out here will always see and hear in 
our dreams after peace has come, the great never-ending 



i 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 431 

tide of human life going forward or coming back, as one 
body of men relieve those who have gone before. Rain 
washed their faces, so that they were red with the smart of 
it. It slashed down their mackintosh capes and beat a 
tattoo on their steel helmets. On the tops of London buses, 
the old black buses which once went pouring up Piccadilly 
before they came out to these dirty roads of war, all the 
steel helmets were tilted sideways as the wind struck aslant 
the muddy brown men with upturned collars on their way 
up to the fighting-lines. 

But last night was fine. The sky cleared and the stars 
were very shining. Orion's Belt was studded with bright 
gems. It was like a night of frost, when the stars have 
a sharper gleam. Away above the trees there was a flash 
of gun-fire, red spreading lights, and sudden quick stabs 
of fire. The guns were getting busy again. "A great 
night for bombing," said an officer; "and good luck for 
to-morrow." Our night patrols were already out. In 
the garden where that officer spoke there was a white milky 
radiance, so that all the trees seemed insubstantial as in a 
fairy grove where Titania might lie sleeping. Far off 
beyond the trees was a white house, and the moonlight lay 
upon it, and gave it a magic look. Perhaps the work being 
done inside was the black magic of war, and men may 
have been bending ove-^ naps strangely marked, and full of 
mystery, unless one knows the code which deals with the 
winning of battles, "For once we may have luck with 
the weather," said another officer. About midnight there 
was a change. Great clouds gathered across the moon. It 
began to rain gustily, and then settled down to a steady, 
slogging downpour. 

Our luck with the weather went out with the stars, and 
this morning when our men went away the ground was 
more hideous than it has ever been this year, and that 
would seem a wild exaggeration to men who tried to get 
through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood on the wet 
days of August. They went into swamps everywhere, into 



432 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the zone of shell-craters newly brimmed with water, and 
along tracks without duck-boards, where men went ankle- 
deep, if not knee-deep or waist-deep. 

The enemy was expecting them. There seems no doubt 
of that. An hour or so before the attack he began to bar- 
rage the ground in some parts, and in their blockhouses 
the German machine-gunners got ready to sweep the ad- 
vancing battalions. Our own barrage thundered out short- 
ly before six from all the guns which had got to their places 
after the great struggle in the mud. On the right the 
ground about Polderhoek Chateau was flooded down in 
the hollow below that ruin, which is perched up on .a rise. 
Our men of the 5th Division — Devons, Scottish Border- 
ers, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry — were not far 
away from it, a few hundred yards, but it was a difficult 
place to attack. The enemy had built concrete defences 
inside and blockhouses on either side of it and in the wood 
behind. But our men went very gallantly through the 
morass, in spite of the machine-gun fire that swept over 
them, and worked on either side of the chateau, closing 
round the blockhouse, while from the centre they made a 
direct attack on the chateau ruins. In spite of the foul 
weather, with a high wind blowing and a thick, wet mist, 
our airmen went out all along the line and flew very low, 
peering down at our men. One of them reported quite 
early that our boys were all round Polderhoek Chateau, 
hauling out the Huns, while bombing fights were in prog- 
ress on either side of it. Later messages confirmed this. 
Sixty prisoners were seen coming back down the Menin 
road. A wounded German officer said the garrison of 
the chateau was 400 men, of four companies. It seems 
that they must all have been taken or killed, for later it was 
established that all the blockhouses and the chateau had 
been cleared, and our men were fighting beyond Polderhoek 
Wood. 

Farther south there was fighting round about Gheluvelt, 
by Devons and Staffords of the 7th Division, and an ob- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 433 

server reported that he had seen Germans running out of 
that chateau down the high road east of it, but it seems 
that there were a number of dug-outs in GheluveU Wood 
where the garrisons held out after our advance attack had 
passed, emd this was a great menace to our men, so that 
they may have had to withdraw in order to avoid that trap, 
or to keep in touch with the troops on their right, w^ho 
were held up at a couple of redoubts in the morning. 

Meanwhile the fiercest battle was being fought by the 
Canadians near the centre of the attack, up the slopes of 
Bellevue below Goudberg (which is just west of Passchen- 
daele), where the enemy had long and elaborate defences 
of concrete, and to the right and left of that from Vienna 
House, below Crest Farm on the right, to the ground on 
the left beyond Wolfe Copse. It was from the direction 
of Peter Pan House and Wolfe Copse that the Canadians 
succeeded in getting a grasp of the Bellevue slopes, at- 
tacking a row of concrete huts in a sunken road which 
were strongly held by German machine-gunners. The 
enemy counter-attacked strongly and sharply down the 
northern end of the spur, and from the direction of Pass- 
chendaele, and drove our men for a time down the slopes, 
though only for a time. Farther left there was heavy fight- 
ing round the pill-boxes. Two of them, Moray House 
and Varlet House, yielded a score or more of prisoners 
each, but the ground all about the left of our attack by 
the Broenbeek and the Watervlietbeek was one great deep 
marsh, through which the men had the utmost difficulty 
in struggling. 

The German wounded are in a terrible condition, cov- 
ered in mud and blood, and shaking as men with ague. 
They are full of despair, and their officers say that Ger- 
many is only holding out in the hope of a U-boat victory. 
The German people, they say, will suffer badly this winter 
from lack of food. Our own wounded are men who seem 
to have come out of watery graves, and are plastered from 
head to foot in a whitish slime. In the field dressing- 



4iS4» FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

stations they are as patient as after all these battles, and if 
in some places they had ill luck they blame the weather for 
it. No words are too bad for that, but in spite of it our 
men did wonders to-day. 

October 28 
The most important position in the attack yesterday was 
given to the Canadians to carry, and the story of their 
capture of the Bellevue spur is fine and thrilling as an act 
of persistent courage by bodies of men struggling against 
great hardships and under great fire. Nothing that they 
did at Courcelette and Vimy and round about Lens was 
finer than the way in which on Friday they fought their 
way up the Bellevue spur, were beaten back by an intense 
destructive fire, and then, reorganizing, went back through 
the wounded and scaled the slope again and drove the Ger- 
man machine-gunners out of their blockhouses. 

I have seen those Germans as prisoners of the- Cana- 
dians. They are men of the nth Bavarian Division, which 
includes the 3rd Bavarian Infantry Regiment and two re- 
serve infantry regiments. The other day I wrote about 
undersized, half-witted fellows who were caught by our 
men, and said the German man-power must be wearing thin 
if they sent recruits like this. These Bavarian soldiers are 
not undersized, but tall, proper men, and stout fellows who 
fought hard. They carried their mud with a certain swag- 
ger, not as men who had surrendered easily, and were not 
utterly dejected, like so many of our prisoners. They had 
been picked to hold Bellevue because of their good moral, 
and they were -full of confidence in their defensive posi- 
tion. They were perched up above the swamps through 
which our men had to wade to get at them. They had 
plenty of concrete houses for their shelter, and their ma- 
chine-guns. The weather was in their favour. They 
guessed that the British would try to attack them again, 
but they looked at the floods and rain-clouds, and felt 
safe, or pretty safe. For some reason of psychology — 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 435 

which is greatly influenced by shell-fire — these men of the 
nth Bavarian Division were not mutinous against dis- 
cipline like other Bavarians, who are cursing the Prussians 
because of too much fighting, and malingering, and jeer- 
ing at the officers, or refusing to go into the forward posi- 
tions, like 800 men of the 99th Reser\re Infantry Regi- 
ment, who, according to a prisoner, revolted against going 
into the line at Lens. 

"They were all sent to prison," says the man, "and seem 
to have been very pleased with the change." 

A look at a contour map explains the reason why the 
nth Bavarians were satisfied with their defensive posi- 
tion at Bellevue, on Goudberg or Meetscheele spur, which 
strikes out v/estwards from the main Passchendaele Ridge. 
The deep gully of the Ravelbeek runs below the slopes on 
which Bellevue is raised, and down there there is one 
filthy swamp of mud and water. On the other side of the 
gully is a hill which rises to Passchendaele, and the sepa- 
rate hummock of Crest Farm, south-east of that high 
pile of ruin, which commands the long, wide view of the 
plains beyond. Bellevue on one side and Crest Farm and 
Passchendaele on the other support each other from at- 
tack, and from their blockhouses they are able to sv/eep 
machine-gun fire upon any bodies of men advancing up 
either slope. So the Australians found in the great at- 
tack on October 12, when they had to fall back, when Pass- 
chendaele itself was almost in their grip, because of the 
enfilade fire from the ground about Bellevue, while other 
Australians, trying to work up those slopes on the west 
side of the Ravelbeek, were terribly scourged by the ma- 
chine-gun barrage. The Canadians knew all that. They, 
too, had the black luck of that terrible twelfth of October, 
when English and New Zealand and Australian troops ad- 
vanced into bogs, struggled through a sea of mud, and 
failed to gain a victory, not by lack of valour, for the 
courage of them all was almost superhuman, or rather 
human as we know it in this war, but by the sheer impossi- 



436 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

bility of getting one leg after the other in the slime that 
covered all this ground. 

It was as bad on Friday morning — worse. The rain had 
poured down all night and the shell-craters brimmed over, 
and every track was so slippery that men with packs and 
rifles fell at every few steps. Beyond the duck-board 
tracks there were no tracks for 1500 yards, and there was 
a morass knee-deep and sticky, so that men had to haul 
each other to get unstuck. In the darkness and pouring 
rain and shell-fire it was hard going — a nightmare of re- 
ality worse than a black dream. But the men got to their 
places and lay in the mud, and hoped they were not seen. 
As I said in my last message, some of them seem to have 
been seen by hostile aircraft coming out before the moon 
went down, and the enemy's guns ravaged the ground 
searching for them. 

The right body of Canadian troops worked up towards 
Crest Farm along the main Passchendaele Ridge — that is 
to say, on the right of the Ravelbeek gully. Their ground 
here was very bad, but nothing like that on the left below 
Bellevue. They got close to Duck Wood, where there 
are" a few stumps of trees to give a meaning to the name, 
and on their right other troops pushed forward towards 
Decline Copse, which protected their flank. Heavy ma- 
chine-gun fire came at them out of Duck Wood, from 
shell-craters and "pill-boxes," and the enemy shelled very 
fiercely all around with high explosives and a great num- 
ber of whiz-bangs from field-batteries very close to them 
just below Passchendaele. All the Canadian soldiers speak 
of these whiz-bangs, directed, after the ground was taken, 
by low-flying aeroplanes, who signalled with flash-lamps 
or with a round or two of machine-gun fire M^hen they 
saw any group of men. The signals were answered rapidly 
by a flight of the small shells. 

But from a tactical point of view, apart from the hard- 
ships and perils of the men, the situation on the Canadian 
right was good. They had their ground, and would have 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 437 

found it easier to hold if all had been well on the other 
side of the Ravelbeek up by Bellevue. All was not well 
there at that time. The Canadian troops on the left were 
having the same tragic adventure as befell the Australians 
in the same place two weeks before. In trying to work up 
beyond Peter Pan House they were caught in the clutch 
of the mud, and moving slowly behind their barrage came 
under the fire of many machine-guns worked by those nth 
Bavarians from a row of blockhouses along the road run- 
ning across the crest of the ridge, and from other strong 
points above and below that line. The Canadian Brigade 
made most desperate attempts to get as far as those damn- 
able little forts, and small parties of grim, resolute fel- 
lows did get a footing on the higher slopes, scrambling 
and stumbling and falling, with the deadly swish of bullets 
about them, and those Bavarians waiting for them with 
their thumbs on the triggers of their weapons behind the 
walls. 

Behind, it was difficult to get news of that heroic Cana- 
dian Brigade. Foul mists and smoke lay low over them; 
no signals or messages came back. An airman, who flew 
along the line to work in contact with the guns, could see 
nothing at two thousand feet, nothing when he risked his 
wings at a thousand feet, nothing still on another journey 
at half that height. The Canadian rockets were all wet, 
and no light answered the airman's signals. Ten times he 
flew along the line, twice at last within two hundred yards 
of the ground, when he did see the infantry struggling 
through the enemy's lash of bullets. A bit of shrapnel 
or shell casing smashed through the airman's engine, and 
his wings were pierced. He flew in a staggering way on 
our side of the lines and crashed down and got back with 
his report. 

The next news was not good. It looked like a tragedy. 
Under the continued fire the Canadian Brigade had to fall 
back from Bellevue almost to their original line. It was 
then that officers and men of this Canadian Brigade showed 



438 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

what stuff they were made of — stuff of spirit and of body. 
Imagine them, these muddy, wet men, with their ranks 
thinned out by losses up those hellish slopes of Bellevue, 
and with all their efforts gone to nothing as they gathered 
together in the mist in the low ground again. It was 
enough to take the heart out of these men. Strengthened 
by a small body of Canadian comrades they re-formed 
and attacked again. That was great and splendid of them. 
The barrage was brought back and the lines of its shell- 
fire moved slowly before them again as when they had first 
started. So they began all over again the struggle through 
which they had already been, and went out again into its 
abomination. Even now I do not know how they gained 
success where they had failed. I doubt whether they 
know. The enemy was still up the slopes and on the slopes, 
still protected in his concrete, and with his machine-guns 
undamaged. But these Canadians worked their way for- 
ward in small packs, and each man among them must have 
been inspired by a kind of rage to get close to the block- 
houses and have done with them. They went through 
those who had fallen in the first attack, and others fell, 
but there was enough to close round the concrete forts and 
put them out of action. The garrisons of these places, 
thirty in the largest of them, fifteen to twenty in the 
smaller kind, had been told to hold them until they were 
killed or captured. They obeyed their orders, but preferred 
capture when the Canadians swarmed about them and 
gave them the choice. There were about 400 prisoners 
brought down from Bellevue, and nearly all of them were 
taken from the blockhouses on the way up to the crest and 
from a row of them along the road which goes across the 
crest. 

It was a few hours before the enemy behind launched 
his counter-attacks, after a heavy shelling of Bellevue, 
which he now knew was lost to him — a bitter surprise to 
his regimental and divisional commanders. It is uncer- 
tain what delayed his counter-attacks, but the mud had 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 439 

something to do with it, for on the German side as well as 
on ours there are swamps in which tall men sink to their 
necks, and bogs in which they are stuck to their knees, so 
badly that some of our prisoners lost their boots in getting 
free of this grip. 

It was at about four o'clock in the afternoon that the 
first German column tried to advance upon Bellevue from 
the northern end of the spur. They were caught in our 
barrage and shattered. Half an hour later another heavy 
attack was delivered against the Canadians on the main 
Passchendaele Ridge, and this was repulsed after close 
and fierce fighting, in which fifty prisoners were taken by 
our side. 

All through the night, after those vain efforts to get 
back their ground, the enemy shelled the Canadian posi- 
tions heavily, but on the left, by Bellevue, the men of that 
brigade, which had done such heroic things, not only held 
their ground, but went farther forward to Bellevue cross- 
roads, where there was another row of blockhouses. They 
were abandoned by the enemy, who had fled hurriedly, 
leaving behind their machine-guns and ammunition — 
eighteen machine-guns on 300 yards of road, which shows 
how strongly this position was held by machine-gun de- 
fence. Yesterday there were more counter-attacks, but 
they had no success, and many lie on the ground. 

The price of victory for the Canadians was heavy in 
physical suffering, and unwounded men as well as wounded 
had to endure agonies of wetness and coldness and thirst 
and exhaustion. It was only their hardness which enabled 
them to endure. They lay in cold slime, and a drop of 
rum would have been elixir vitse to them. Away behind, 
carrying parties were stuck in bogs as the fighting men 
had been stuck. Pack-mules were floundering in shell- 
craters. Men were rescuing their comrades out of pits 
and then sinking themselves and crying for help. At ten 
yards distance no shout was heard because of the roar of 



440 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

gun-fire and the howling of shells and the high wailing 
of the wind. 

"I saw some fellows in front of me," said a wounded lad 
of the Devons, "and I halloed to them because I wanted 
company and a bit of help. But they didn't hear all my 
halloing, and they went faster than I could, and I could 
not catch up with them because my leg was bad." 

"It was water we wanted most," said a young Canadian, 
"and some of us were four days thirsty in the front line. 
No blame to anybody. It was the state of the ground." 

"I had a poisoned finger," said a young field-gunner, 
"and my arm swelled up, but I couldn't leave the battery 
before the show, as they were short-handed." 

Sitting round after the battle these men out of the 
slime, these muddy, bloody men, spoke quietly and soberly 
about things they had seen and suffered, and the tales they 
told would freeze the blood of gentle souls who do not 
know even now, after three years of war, what war means 
to the fighting men. But as they listened to each other 
they nodded, as though to ,say, "Yes, that's how it was," 
and there was no consciousness among them of extraordi- 
nary adventures, and neither self-glory nor self-pity. They 
had just done their job, as when their wounds heal they will 
do it again, if fate so wills. 

What I have written about the Canadians is true of all 
English battalions who were fighting on each side of them, 
and to whom I devoted most of my message on the day of 
the battle. Those London Territorials, Lancashire troops, 
Artists Rifles, Bedfords, and the old county regiments of 
the 5th and 7th Divisions who were fighting around Pol- 
derhoek Chateau and on the way to Gheluvelt had the same 
sufferings, the same difficulties in bad ground, the same 
ordeal of shell-fire, machine-gun fire, and German counter- 
attacks. They showed the same courage, neither more nor 
less, and although the capture of Bellevue spur was the 
most important gain of the day, it was only possible be- 
cause the English battalions on either side kept the enemy 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 441 

hotly engaged, and assaulted his lines of blockhouses with 
repeated efforts. The fighting of the Artists Rifles and 
Bedfords of the 63rd Division was typical of all the history 
of this day in hardship and valour. Even the German offi- 
cers taken prisoners by them expressed their wonderment 
and admiration. "Your men are magnificent," they said. 
"They have achieved the impossible. We did not think 
any troops could cross such ground." That belief was rea- 
sonable. The stream of the Paddebeek had become a 
wide flood, like all the other beeks in the fighting ground. 
It seemed unfordable and impassable, and on the other 
side of it was the old German trench system with machine- 
gun emplacements. The 63rd plunged in, wading up to 
their waists, and horribly hampered while machine-gun bul- 
lets whipped the surface of the water. There was fierce 
fighting for Varlet House, a strong blockhouse, and the 
Artists and Bedfords, Royal Fusiliers and Shropshires 
swarmed round it, and finally routed the garrison. Desper- 
ate attempts were made against other strong points, and 
the men of the 63rd Division gained some of them, and 
captured about 140 prisoners. 

Meanwhile on the left of our line, around the flooded 
areas to the west of Houthulst Forest, the French have 
made great progress on Friday and Saturday. The Bel- 
gians have made a dash too, and there was a gallant epi- 
sode, not without a gleam of humour, when a small party 
of Belgian soldiers crossed the marshes in a punt, found 
the ground deserted by the enemy, and went forward at a 
hot pace to join up with the French in the freshly captured 
village of Merckem. The French themselves have cleared 
a wide tract of marsh-land during these two days' opera- 
tions, cleared it of men and cleared it of guns, which the 
enemy had just time to drag away round a spit of land on 
the edge of the floods. These floods are very deep and 
broad above Bixschoote and below Dixmude, where the 
St.-Jansbeek slopes over by Langewaade and swirls round 
a peninsula of mud. 



442 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

On Friday the French routed out the German outposts 
who guarded that mud-bank, several thousands yards in 
length, and yesterday made a bigger attack above St.-Jans- 
beek and Draeibank. Before their gallant infantry ad- 
vanced through these bogs, for it is all a bog, the French 
gunners were in full orchestra, and played a terrible sym- 
phony on the 75's and 120's. Over 160,000 shells were 
fired by the "soixante-quinze" batteries at the German posi- 
tions in the marshes and on the west side of Houthulst 
Forest. Then under cover of this fury of the fire the 
French infantry advanced in waves. In spite of the ground 
they went very fast and very far, and spread out in a fan- 
shaped phalanx between Merckem and Aschoop. Their 
field-guns are now able to enfilade Houthulst Forest on 
the western side, and the German guns north of that must 
be making their escape. It is an important tactical success, 
which will make Houthulst Forest less tenable by the 
enemy. 

October 30 

Following up the heroic capture of Bellevue spur, on 
October 26, the Canadians attacked again this morning on 
both sides of the Ravelbeek, working up from Bellevue 
to the top of Meetscheele spur on the left, and gaining 
Crest Farm on the right, up the main ridge of Passchen- 
daele. If this ground can be held — and the taking is some- 
times not so hard as the holding — almost the last heights 
of the Passchendaele Ridge are within our grasp, and all 
the desperate fighting of the last three months or more, the 
great assaults on the ridges by English, Scottish, Irish, 
Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian troops, through 
bogs and marshes in the low ground, against concrete 
blockhouses and great numbers of machine-guns, against 
masses of the finest German troops fighting every yard of 
the way, and against incredibly bad luck with the weather, 
even as far back as August, will have given us the domi- 
nating ground in Flanders overlooking the plains beyond. 

Crest Farm, on a knoll below the village of Passchen- 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 443 

daele, is the outer fort of Passchendaele itself, and its cap- 
ture exposes the greater fortress under the ragged ruins 
which stick up like fangs on the skyline of the ridge. 

Without Crest Farm Passchendaele was unapproach- 
able, and the capture of this hummock is of historical im- 
portance. But in order to take or hold it, as the Austra- 
lians found, it was necessary that Bellevue and Meetscheele 
should also be ours. Both heights were taken this morning 
by the Canadians. 

It was not a great battle in numbers of men, and the 
longest distance to go was not more than a thousand yards, 
but it was a hard battle, not won lightly, because of the 
desperate resistance of the enemy, the difficulty of the 
ground, the badness of the weather, and the physical hard- 
ships endured by the men. The enemy had relieved his 
troops who met the Canadians' attack on Bellevue on Fri- 
day last — the nth Bavarian Division, who are now said 
to be on their way to Italy — although I saw one of their 
non-commissioned officers this morning, taken prisoner a 
few hours before, after he had been lying in a shell-hole 
for three days. He knew nothing about his division and 
nothing about the German thrust in Italy. Nor did he 
care what had happened over there, but was only glad to 
be out of the shell-fire with the hope that the war would 
end soon, somehow and anyhow. His division had appar- 
ently been replaced by the 238th, a strong and well-dis- 
ciplined crowd of men, who knew the value of the Pass- 
chendaele Ridge, and fought hard this morning until the 
Canadians had forced their blockhouse when the rest of 
them ran back into Passchendaele. 

The German Command probably expected an attack this 
morning. As usual, yesterday he shelled heavily over the 
neighbourhood of our tracks and back areas of the battle 
zone in order to hinder the getting up of supplies, and in 
the night he sent out his air squadrons to bomb the coun- 
try about Ypres and try to play hell generally behind our 
lines. Our airmen were about in the night too. It was 



444? FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the night of the full moon, wonderfully clear and beautiful 
in this part of Flanders, and many tons of explosives were 
dropped over enemy dumps and batteries and routes of 
march. The weatherwise, who have been gloomy souls for 
some weeks, and no wonder, predicted heavy rain before 
the night was out, and a rising gale of wind. They were 
right about the wind. It came howling across the sea and 
the flats from somewhere in the west of Ireland, but it 
veered to the east later in the night and the rain held off 
until after midday. By that time our attack had gone 
away and gained the ground; and it is in their new posi- 
tions that the Canadians and other British troops are now 
suffering the foul storm, with a cold rain slashing upon 
them. The night was cold for them, and they lay out in 
shell-holes, getting numbed and cramped and longing for 
the first gleam of light, when they could get on the move 
and do this fighting. It is the waiting which is always 
worst, and it was waiting under the heavy fire of big shells 
and shrapnel and whiz-bangs and gas-shells and machine- 
gun bursts scattered over the sodden fields in this wet dark- 
ness without aim, but sinister in its blind search for men. 
The carriers trudged through all this, stubborn in spirit, to 
get up ammunition and supplies. There was rum for the 
fighting men, and they thanked God for it, because it gave 
them a little warmth of body and soul in the cold quarter 
of an hour before an attack at dawn, when the vitality 
of men is low. 

Some of the Canadians say that the enemy started to 
barrage before our own artillery gave the signal of attack 
by combined fire. Five minutes before the start, they say, 
hostile shell-fire burst over them. Men get this fancy 
sometimes when there is no truth in it, but it may have 
been true. They all agree that the German SOS flared 
up instantly the attack was begun, and that the enemy's 
gunners answered it without a second's pause. At the 
same time many machine-guns began their sharp tattoo 
from the blockhouses on the slopes above and from many 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 44^ 

hiding-places. In front of the Princess Patricia's Light 
Infantry there was a number of fanged tree-stumps called 
by the sylvan name of Friesland Copse. They expected 
one or two machine-guns there, but found a nest of them. 
It was a hornets' nest, not easily routed out. The German 
machine-gunners kept up a steady stream of bullets across 
their field of fire, and the Princess Pat's suffered in trying 
to rush the place. Small parties of them assaulted it with 
grim courage, and when they fell, or took cover in shell- 
craters, others made their way forward, trying to get round 
the flanks of the position. It was in that way finally that 
they made the last close dash upon the emplacements and 
destroyed them. Some of the German gunners surrendered 
here, but not many. Hard and fierce was the fighting at 
close quarters. 

The Canadian troops pushed on to Meetscheele village — 
no village at all, as you may guess, but just a tract of shell- 
craters and a few mounds of broken brick about a few 
concrete chambers, with dead bodies of German soldiers 
lying huddled outside the walls. That is a village in the 
battlefields. The blockhouses gave trouble, for there were 
living men inside with the usual weapon which spat out 
bullets. So there was another struggle here, very fierce 
and bloody, and the place was only taken by groups of 
men who crawled round it in the mud, sprang at it out of 
shell-craters, and acted with individual cunning and cour- 
age. That at least is how some of these men described 
it this morning, when they came away with wounds. Be- 
yond Meetscheele was another row of blockhouses on a 
road, and another fight, desperate and exhausting and 
bloody. But it was from that neighbourhood that the Ger- 
mans began to run, and when they were seen running the 
Canadians knew that the objectives had been won. All 
that was on the left of the Ravelbeek stream, which is a 
No Man's Land of slime between the slopes. 

On the right, which is the main Passchendaele Ridge, 
another Canadian Brigade was fighting up to Crest Farm. 



446 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

They, too, had to assault some "pill-boxes" and had to 
fight hard for their ground, but they captured Crest Farm 
and the farmer's boys, who were stalwart young Germans, 
and a number of machines with which they plough the 
fields for the harvest of death. These machine-guns and 
their ammunition store were used against the enemy by 
the Canadians, and helped to smash up the counter-attacks, 
which assaulted the new positions very quickly after their 
capture. On the extreme right of the Canadians the enemy 
opened a very heavy bombardment from the Keif burg 
spur, and it was so violent that special artillery action was 
called for, and a number of Australian heavies took meas- 
ures to silence these guns. The first counter-attack de- 
veloped at about eight o'clock, from the direction of Mos- 
selmarkt, but this was dealt with by our guns, and did not 
reach the Canadian lines. Our airmen, flying in the gale, 
reported groups of men retreating in a disorderly way, and 
the German stretcher-bearers were busy. At about 9.30 
hostile infantry in extended order were seen advancing 
towards the front, and our guns again got busy. Mean- 
while the Artists, Bed fords, Royal Fusiliers, and Shrop- 
shires of the 63rd Division, and London men of the 58th 
Division were fighting in the low swampy ground to the 
north of the Canadians. They have had a very hard time 
on both sides of the Paddebeek and in other swamps, where 
little isolated garrisons of the enemy hold their "pill-boxes" 
in a girdle of the machine-gun fire. The rain is now heavy, 
and a thick, dank mist lies over the fields, and what was 
bad ground is, now worse ground. There is no aeroplane 
observation this afternoon, and the Canadians^ who are 
holding the captured positions, can no longer be seen by 
the hostile air squadrons. This morning they flew very 
low over the infantry in places, dropping bombs and firing 
their machine-guns at groups of men. The battle is one of 
those called "a minor operation," but the ground taken by 
heroic effort is the gateway to Passchendaele. 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 447 

24 

London Men and Artists 

October 31 
We still hold the high ground about Crest Farm and the 
Meetscheele Spur, from which Passchendaele is only 400 or 
500 yards distant, and the Canadians have consolidated 
their positions there, and with the help of the guns have 
beaten off the enemy's counter-attacks. Up there the 
ground is dry, and the Canadian soldiers are on sandy soil 
above the hideous swamps of the valleys and beeks. The 
enemy's batteries are shelling our new lines with intense 
fire, and are attempting as usual to harass our tracks and 
artillery. To-day, after the battle, the weather is clear and 
beautiful again, as it was on the day after the last battle — 
a tragic irony which makes our men rather bitter with 
their luck — and in the sunshine and fleecy clouds there are 
many hostile aeroplanes overhead and many air combats 
between their fighting-planes and ours. I saw the be- 
ginning of one over Ypres this morning before the chase 
of the enemy machine passed out of sight with a burst of 
machine-gun fire, and all through the morning our anti- 
aircraft guns were busy flinging white shrapnel at these 
birds, who came with prying eyes over our camps, their 
wings all shining in the sunhght and looking no bigger 
than butterflies at the height they flew. Yesterday, during 
the battle, it was almost impossible to fly, owing to the 
strength of the gale, and impossible to see unless a pilot 
almost brushed the earth with his wings. One of our air- 
men did fly as low as that, as I have told, and went ten 
times on his business up and down the Canadian lines. But 
elsewhere, above the dreadful swamps of the Paddebeek 
and the Lekkerbolerbeek, the airmen had an almost hope- 
less task. 

It was partly owing to this that it was very difficult to 



448 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

get any news of the London Territorials of the 58th Divi- 
sion and the Artists, Bedfords, and others of the 63rd 
who went away at the same time as the Canadians in the 
low ground instead of on high ground. Even their bat- 
talion commanders, not far behind, could see nothing of 
the men when the attack had started, and could get no ex- 
act knowledge of them for many hours. The wounded 
came back to give vague hints of what was happening, but 
as a rule wounded men know nothing more than their own 
adventures in their own track of shell-craters. Some of 
them have never come back. No man knows yet what has 
become of them out there. Little groups may still be hold- 
ing on to advanced posts out there in the swamps. 

It is idle for me to try to describe this ground again, 
the ground over which the London men and the Artists had 
to attack. Nothing that I can write will convey remotely 
the look of such ground and the horror of it. Unless one 
has seen vast fields of barren earth, blasted for miles by 
shell-fire, pitted b)?^ deep craters so close that they are like 
holes in a sieve, and so deep that the tallest men can drown 
in them when they are filled with water, as they are now 
filled, imagination cannot conceive the picture of this slough 
of despond into which our modern Christians plunge with 
packs on their backs and faith in their hearts to face 
dragons of fire a thousand times more frightful than those 
encountered in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The shell-craters 
yesterday were overbrimmed with water, and along the 
way of the beeks, flung out of bounds by great gun-fire, 
these were nqt ponds and pools, but broad deep lakes in 
which the litter and corruption of the battlefield floated. 

The London Territorials had in front of them a number 
of blockhouses held by the enemy's machine-gunners on 
each side of the road which runs from Poelcappelle to 
Spriet. Far out in front of their line was a place called 
Whitechapel — a curious coincidence that Londoners should 
attack in its neighbourhood — and nearer to them, scat- 
tered about in enfilade positions, were other "pill-boxes.'' 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 449 

On hard ground in decent weather these places could have 
been assaulted and — if courage counts, as it does — taken 
by these splendid London lads o£ ours, whose spirit was 
high before the battle, and who have proved their quality, 
not only before in this Flanders battle, but also at Bulle- 
court and other places in the line. But yesterday luck was 
dead against them. Archangels would have needed their 
wings to get across such ground, and the London men had 
no divine help in that way, and had to wade and haul 
out one leg after the other from this deep sucking bog, 
and could hardly do that. Hundreds of them were held 
in the bog as though in glue, and sank above their waists. 
Our artillery barrage, which was very heavy and wide, 
moved forward at a slow crawling pace, but it could not 
easily be followed. It took many men an hour and a half 
to come back a hundred and fifty yards. A rescue party 
led by a sergeant-major could not haul out men breast 
high in the bog until they had surrounded them with duck- 
boards and fastened ropes to them. Our barrage went 
ahead and the enemy's barrage came down, and from the 
German blockhouses came a chattering fire of machine- 
guns, and in the great stretch of swamp the London men 
struggled. 

And not far away from them, but invisible in their own 
trouble among the pits, the Artists Rifles, Bed fords, and 
Shropshires were trying to get forward to other block- 
houses on the way to the rising ground beyond the Padde- 
beek. The Artists and their comrades were more severely 
tried by shell-fire than the Londoners. No doubt the enemy 
had been standing at his guns through the night, ready to 
fire at the first streak of dawn, which might bring an Eng- 
lish attack, or the first rocket as a call to them from the 
garrisons of the blockhouses. A light went up, and in- 
stantly there roared out a great sweep of fire from heavy 
batteries and field-guns; 4-2's and 5'9's fell densely and in 
depth, and this bombardment did not slacken for hours. 
It was a tragic time for our valiant men, struggling in 



450 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

the slime with their feet dragged down. They suffered, 
but did not retreat. No man fell back, but either fell under 
the shell-fire or went on. Some groups of London lads 
were seen going over a little rise in the ground far ahead, 
but no more has been heard of them. Some of them got 
as far as the blockhouses, assaulted them without any pro- 
tective fire from our artillery, because the barrage was 
ahead, and captured them. By this wonderful courage in 
the worst and foulest conditions that may be known by 
fighting men they took Noble's Farm and Tracas Farm. 
!' It was by this latter farm that an heroic act was done 
by a young London lieutenant — one of those boys of ours 
who heard the call to the colours and went quickly round 
to the nearest recruiting office, not knowing what war was, 
but eager to offer his youth. He knew the full meaning of 
war yesterday by the concrete blockhouse on the Tracas 
road. He had a group of men with him, his own men 
from his own platoon, and he asked them to stick it out 
with him. They stuck it out until all were killed or 
wounded, and the last of them still standing was this lieu- 
tenant. I do not know if even he was standing at the end, 
for he had been wounded. He had been wounded not once 
only, but eight times, and still he asked his men to stick 
it out with him, and at last fell among them, and so was 
picked up by the stretcher-bearers when they came search- 
ing round this place under heavy fire, and found all the 
men lying there. 

There was a queer kind of road going nowhere and 
coming from nowhere east of Papa House. For some 
time before the battle Germans were seen coming out of 
it, remarkably clean, and not like men who have been liv- 
ing in mud-holes. It is a concrete street tunnelled and 
apertured for machine-guns, and bullets poured from it 
yesterday, and the London lads had a hard time in front 
of it. The London Regiment and the Royal Fusiliers who 
fought this battle, and not far from them were the Artists 
Rifles— ^:he dear old "Artists" who in the old Volunteer 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 451; 

days looked so dandy in their grey and silver across the 
lawns of Wimbledon. They suffered yesterday in hellish 
fire, and made heavy sacrifices to prove their quality. It 
was a fight against the elements, in league with the Ger- 
man explosives, and it was a frightful combination for the 
boys of London and the clean-shaven fellows of the Naval 
Brigade, who looked so splendid on the roads before they 
went into this mud. They did not gain all their objectives 
yesterday, but what glory there is in human courage in the 
most fiery ordeal they gained eternally. 

The gunners were great too. They were in the mud 
like the infantry in some places. They were heavily 
shelled, and the transport men and gun-layers and gunner 
officers had to get a barrage down when it was difficult 
to stand steady in the bogs. They have done this not for 
one day and night but for many days and nights, and the 
strain upon them has been nerve-racking. After the last 
battle, when the Londoners were relieved and marched 
down past the guns, they cheered those gunners who had 
answered their signals and given them great bombard- 
ment and worked under heavy fire. I think the cheers 
of those mud- and blood-stained men to the London gun- 
ners ring out in an heroic way above the noise and tragedy 
of battle. 

25 

The Capture of Passchendaelb 

November 6 
It is with thankfulness that one can record to-day the cap- 
ture of Passchendaele, the crown and crest of the ridge 
which made a great barrier round the salient of Ypres 
and hemmed us in the flats and swamps. After an heroic 
attack by the Canadians this morning they fought their 
way over the ruins of Passchendaele and into ground be- 
yond it. If their gains be held the seal is set upon the 



452 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

most terrific achievement of war ever attempted and car- 
ried through by British arms. 

Only we out here who have known the full and intimate 
details of that fighting, the valour and the sacrifice which 
have carried our waves of men up those slopes, starting at 
Messines and Wyschaete at the lower end of the range in 
June last, crossing the Pilkem Ridge in the north, and 
then storming the central heights from Westhoek to Poly- 
gon Wood through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, 
from Zonnebeke to Broodseinde, from the Gavenstafel to 
Abraham Heights, from Langemarck to Poelcappelle, can 
understand the meaning of to-day's battle and the thrill 
at the heart which has come to all of us to-day because of 
the victory. For at and around Passchendaele is the high- 
est ground on the ridge, looking down across the sweep of 
the plains into which the enemy has been thrust, where 
he has his camps and his dumps, where from this time 
hence, if we are able to keep the place, we shall see all his 
roads winding like tapes below us and his men marching up 
them like ants, and the flash and fire of his guns and all 
the secrets of his life, as for three years he looked down on 
us and gave us hell. 

What is Passchendaele? As I saw it this morning 
through the smoke of gun-fire and a wet mist it was less 
than I had seen before, a week or two ago, with just one 
ruin there — the ruin of its church — a black mass of slaugh- 
tered masonry and nothing else, not a house left stand- 
ing, not a huddle of brick on that shell-swept height. But 
because of its position as the crown of the ridge that crest 
has seemed to niany men like a prize for which all these bat- 
tles of Flanders have been fought, and to get to this place 
and the slopes and ridges on the way to it, not only for its 
own sake but for what it would bring with it, great numbers 
of our most gallant men have given their blood, and thou- 
sands — scores of thousands — of British soldiers of our 
own home stock and from overseas have gone through 
fire and water, the fire of frightful bombardments, the 



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THE 

ME SSTNES RIDGE 

AND 

PASSCHENDAELE 

Scale 2 Miles to 1 Inch 
Approximate Battle Fronts 

June 1916 ■ 

Dec. 1917 im t 

Land above 250 fe. 

IZSto 250 ,. 

„ 125 ,, 



FLANDERS FRONT AFTER THE CAPTURE OF PASSCHENDAEI.E 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 453 

water of the swamps, of the beeks and shell-holes, in which 
they have plunged and waded and stuck and sometimes 
drowned. To defend this ridge and Passchendaele, the 
crest of it, the enemy has massed great numbers of guns 
and incredible numbers of machine-guns and many of his 
finest divisions. To check our progress he devised new 
systems of defence and built his concrete blockhouses in 
echelon formation, and at every cross-road, and in every 
bit of village or farmstead, and our men had to attack 
that chain of forts through its girdles of machine-gun fire, 
and, after a great price of life, mastered it. The weather 
fought for the enemy again and again on the days of our 
attacks, and the horrors of the mud and bogs in this great 
desolation of crater-land miles deep — eight miles deep — 
over a wide sweep of country, belongs to the grimmest re- 
membrances of every soldier who has fought in this battle 
of Flanders. The enemy may brush aside our capture of 
Passchendaele as the taking of a mud-patch, but to resist 
it he has at one time or another put nearly a hundred divi- 
sions into the arena of blood, and the defence has cost him 
a vast sum of loss in dead and wounded. I saw his dead 
in Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, and over all this 
ground where the young manhood of Germany lies black 
and in corruption. It was not for worthless ground that 
so many of them died and suffered great agonies, and 
fought desperately and came back again and again in 
massed counter-attacks, swept to pieces by our guns and 
our rifle-fire. Passchendaele is but a pinprick on a fair- 
sized map, but so that we should not take it the enemy had 
spent much of his man-power and his gun-power without 
stint, and there have flowed up to his guns tides of shells 
almost as great as the tides that flowed up to our guns, 
and throughout these months he has never ceased, by day 
or night, to pour out hurricanes of fire over all these fields, 
in the hope of smashing up our progress. A few days ago 
orders were issued to his troops. They were given in the 
name of Hindenburg. Passchendaele must be held at all 



454< FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

costs, and, if lost, must be recaptured at all costs. Pass- 
chendaele has been lost to the enemy to-day, and if we 
have any fortune in war, it will not be retaken. 

The Canadians have had more luck than the English, 
New Zealand and Australian troops who fought the bat- 
tles on the way up with most heroic endeavour, and not 
a man in the Army will begrudge them the honour which 
they have gained, not easily, not without the usual price of 
victory, which is some men's death and many men's pain. 
For several days the enemy has endeavoured to thrust us 
back from the positions held round Crest Farm and on 
the left beyond the Paddebeek, where all the ground is a 
morass. The Artists and Bedfords who fought there on 
the left on the last days of last month had a very hard and 
tragic time, but it was their grim stoicism in holding on to 
exposed outposts — small groups of men under great shell- 
fire — which enabled the Canadians this morning to attack 
from a good position. A special tribute is due to two 
companies of Shropshires who, with Canadian guides, 
worked through a woodland plantation, drove a wedge 
into enemy territory, and held it against all attempts to 
dislodge them. 

Heavy German counter-attacks were made during the 
past few days to drive us off Crest Farm and the Meet- 
scheele spur, but they only made a slight lodgment near 
Crest Farm and were thrust back with great loss to them- 
selves. Meanwhile there was the usual vast activity on 
our side in making tracks and carrying railroads a few 
hundred yards nearer, and hauling forward heavy guns 
out of the slough in which they were deeply sunk, and 
carrying up stores of ammunition and supplies for men and 
guns, and all this work by pioneers and engineers and 
transport men and infantry was done under infernal fire 
and in deep mud and filth. Last night the enemy increased 
his fire as though he guessed his time was at hand, and all 
night he flung down harassing barrages and scattered shells 
from his heavies and used gas-shells to search and dope 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 455 

our batteries, and tried hard by every devilish thing in war 
to prevent the assembly of troops. The Canadians assem- 
bled — lying out in shell-craters and in the deep slime of the 
mud, and under this fire, and though there were anxious 
hours and a great strain upon officers and men, and many 
casualties, the spirit of the men was not broken, and in a 
wonderful way they escaped great losses. It was a moist, 
soft night, with a stiff wind blowing. The weather 
prophets in the evening had shaken their heads gloomily 
and said, "It will rain, beyond all doubt." But luck was 
with our troops for once, and the sun rose in a clear sky. 
There was a great beauty in the sky at daybreak, and I 
thought of the sun of Austerlitz and hoped it might pre- 
sage victory for our men to-day. Beneath the banks of 
clouds, all dove-grey, like the wings of birds, the sun rose 
in a lake of gold, and all the edges of the clouds were 
wonderfully gleaming. The woods in their russet foliage 
were touched with ruddy fires, so that every crinkled leaf 
was a little flame. The leares were being caught up by 
the wind and torn from their twigs and scattered across the 
fields, and the wet ditches were deep with leaves that had 
fallen and reddened in last week's rain. But it was the 
light of the dawn that gave a strange spiritual value to 
every scene on the way to the battlefield, putting a glamour 
upon the walls of broken houses and shining mistily in the 
pools of the Yser Canal and upon its mud-banks, and the 
strange little earth dwellings which our men once used 
to inhabit along its line of dead trees, with their trunks 
wet and bright. When I went up over the old battlefields 
this glory gradually faded out of the sky, and the clouds 
gathered and darkened in heavy grey masses and there 
was a wet smell in the wind which told one that the 
prophets were not wrong about the coming of rain. But 
the duck-boards were still dry and it made walking easier, 
though any false step would drop one into a shell-crater 
filled to the brim with water of vivid metallic colours, or 
into broad stretching bogs churned up by recent shell-fire 



456 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

and churned again by shells that came over now, bursting 
with a loud roar after their long high scream, and flinging 
up waterspouts after their pitch into the mud. The Ger- 
man long-range guns were scattering shells about with 
blind eyes, doing guesswork as to the whereabouts of our 
batteries, or firing from aeroplane photographs to tape out 
the windings of our duck-board tracks and the long 
straight roads of our railway lines. For miles along and 
around the same track where I walked, single files of men 
were plodding along, their grey figures silhouetted where 
they tramped on the skyline, with capes blowing and steel 
hats shining. Every minute a big shell burst near one 
of these files, and it seemed as if some men must have been 
wiped out, but always when the smoke cleared the line was 
closed up and did not halt on its way. The wind was 
blowing, but all this grey sky overhead was threaded 
through with aeroplanes — our birds going out to the battle. 
They flew high, in flights of six, or singly at a swift pace, 
and beneath their planes our shells were in flight from 
heavy howitzers and long-muzzled guns whose fire swept 
one with blasts of air and smashed against one's ears. Out 
of the wild wide waste of these battlefields with their dead 
tree-stumps and their old upheaved trenches, and litter of 
battle, and endless craters out of which the muddy water 
slopped, there rose a queer big beast, monstrous and un- 
gainly as a mammoth in the beginning of the world's slime. 
It was one of our "sausage" balloons getting up for the 
morning's work. Its big air-pockets flapped like ears, and 
as it rose its body heaved and swelled. 

It was beyond the line of German "pill-boxes" captured 
in the fighting on the way to the Steenbeek, and now all 
flooded and stinking in its concrete rooms, that I saw 
Passchendaele this morning. The long ridge to which the 
village gives its name curved round black and grim below 
the clouds, right round to Polygon Wood and the heights 
of Broodseinde, a long formidable barrier, a great ram- 
part against which during these four months of fighting 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 457 

our men flung themselves, until by massed courage, in 
which individual deeds are swallowed up so that the world 
will never know what each man did, they gained those 
rolling slopes and the hummocks on them and the valleys 
in between, and all their hidden forts. Below the ridge 
all our field-guns were firing, and the light of their flashes 
ran up and down like Jack o' Lanterns with flaming 
torches. Far behind me were our heavy guns, and their 
shells travelled overhead with a great beating of the wind. 
In the sky around was the savage whine of German shells, 
and all below the Passchendaele Ridge monstrous shells 
were flinging up masses of earth and water, and now and 
then fires were lighted and blazed and then went out in wet 
smoke. 

The Canadians had been fighting in and beyond Pass- 
chendaele. They had been fighting around the village of 
Mosselmarkt, on the Goudberg spur. It was reported they 
had carried all their objectives and were consolidating their 
defences for the counter-attacks which were sure to come. 
The enemy had put a new division into the line before our 
attack, a division up from the Champagne, and, judging 
from the prisoners taken to-day, a smart, strong, and well- 
disciplined crowd of men. But they did not fight much as 
soon as the Canadians were close up on them. The Cana- 
dian fighting was chiefly through shell-fire which came 
down heavily a minute or so after our drum-fire began, 
and against machine-gun fire which came out of the block- 
houses in and around Passchendaele, from the cellars there, 
and other cellars at Mosselmarkt. 

The Canadians on the right were first to get to Pass- 
chendaele Church. Wounded men say they saw the Ger- 
mans running away as they worked round the church. On 
the left the Canadians had farther to go, but wave after 
wave of them closed in and got into touch with their right 
wing. The enemy's machine-gun fire was very severe, 
especially from a long-range barrage, but there was little 
hand-to-hand fighting in Passchendaele, and the men who 



458 FROM BAPAIBIE TO PASSCHENDAELE 

did not escape surrendered and begged for mercy. Up to 
the time I write I have no knowledge of any counter-attack, 
but it was reported quite early in the morning that there 
were masses of Germans packed into shell-holes on the 
right of the village, and others have been seen assembling 
on the roads to the north of Passchendaele. The Cana- 
dians believe they will hold their gains. If they do, their 
victory will be a fine climax to these long battles in Flan- 
ders, which have virtually given us the great ridge, all but 
some outlying spurs of it, and the command of the plains 
beyond. 

November 7 

Hindenburg's command that Passchendaele must be held 
at all costs, or if lost retaken at all costs, has not so far 
been fulfilled by the Eleventh Prussian Division which 
garrisoned the crest of the great ridge. Passchendaele and 
the high ground about it is firmly ours, and as yet there 
have been only a few feeble attempts at counter-attacks by 
the enemy. Why there was no strong and well-organized 
counter-attack is a mystery to the German officers and 
men taken prisoner by us, and especially to two battalion 
commanders whom I saw marching down to-day behind 
our lines at the head of a small party of Prussian soldiers. 

One of the German colonels was the commander of the 
support battalion. He had apparently come up to Pass- 
chendaele the night before to confer with the commander 
of the front line. Now from six o'clock yesterday morn- 
ing until four o'clock in the afternoon he sat, with his 
brother-officer and four or five men, in that little stone 
house which was already their prison and might be their 
tomb. For some queer reason this pill-box of theirs, or 
dose-box as the Canadians call it, was overlooked by the 
assaulting troops. As no machine-gun fire came from it, it 
was passed by, perhaps as an empty house, and the mop- 
pers-up did not trouble about it. The commander of the 
support line, a tall, bearded man, very handsome and sol- 
dierly as I saw him to-day, urged the other commanding 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 459 

officer, a younger, weaker-looking man, to stay quiet and 
await the counter-attack. "Our men are sure to come," 
he said, "and then we shall be rescued." 

But hour after hour passed following the British attack 
at dawn, and there was no sign of advancing Germans or 
of retreating Canadians. Imagine the nervous strain of 
those two men, and of the soldiers who sat watching them 
and listening to their conversation, as it could be heard 
through the crashing of shells outside. At four o'clock 
neither of these battalion commanders could endure the 
situation longer. 

"If we stay here they will kill us when they find us," 
said the tall, bearded man. "It is better to give ourselves 
up now," they decided. So they have told their own story, 
and at four o'clock they went outside and crossed a few 
yards of ground, until they were seen by some of the Cana- 
dians, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender. 

It may have been that the absence of the commander 
of the support line was the reason for the poor effort made 
to counter-attack yesterday after the Canadian assault had 
swept through Passchendaele and on the right and on the 
left had fought along the crest of the Boudberg spur, 
through Meetscheele and Mosselmarkt. I think there must 
have been other reasons, but whether or not it is certain 
that no big attack developed. Groups of men were seen 
assembling yesterday at various places to the north of 
Passchendaele, but these were scattered by our gun-fire. 
Other groups were seen to the north of Mosselmarkt on 
the left, but these were also broken up and did not draw 
near. One officer tried to get up with his men, but when 
he saw there was no support, and that our shell-fire was 
heavy, he retired, and a few of his men were taken pris- 
oners. After fierce gun-fire yesterday afternoon all along 
the crest of the ridge, the enemy's bombardment slackened 
off, and the night was quieter than the Canadians had ex- 
pected, though Passchendaele and its neighbourhood could 
not be called a really quiet spot. 



460 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

I have told already in my message yesterday the general 
outline of the Canadian attack, which has won ground for 
which so many thousands of our men have been fighting, 
up the slopes and through the valleys along the spurs, and 
since the beginning of the battle of Flanders, until only 
this crown at the northern end of the ridge remained to 
be dragged from the enemy's grasp. In Passchendaele it- 
self the Prussian garrison did not fight very stubbornly, 
but fled, if the men had any chance, as soon as the Cana- 
dians were sighted at close quarters. In spite of the severe 
machine-gun fire the Canadian advance on that right wing 
was rapid and complete, and they sent back about 230 
prisoners from the blockhouses and cellars and shell-craters 
during the morning. The action was more difficult on the 
left, up from Meetscheele to Mosselmarkt and Goudberg, 
a distance of more than a thousand yards, and a farther 
objective than that of their comrades on the right. The 
Canadians here on the left were confronted with a diffi- 
cult problem, owing to the nature of the ground. Below 
the Goudberg spur on its western side was the horrible 
swamp into which the Artists, Bedfords, and others had 
plunged when they made their desperate attack in the last 
days of October. The enemy had outposts in these marshes 
at Vine Cottage — a sweet, pitiful name for such a place — 
and Vanity Farm. For a time they had thrust a wedge into 
our line here on the left of the Canadians between Source 
Trench and Source Farm, but, as I have already told, an 
heroic little attack by English and Canadian troops drove 
them out before yesterday's battle, and these small groups 
of men held 'on grimly under great difficulties, quite iso- 
lated in their bog. It was necessary to capture Vine Cot- 
tage in order to defend the Canadian left flank in this last 
attack, and for that purpose a small body of Canadians 
were sent off the night before last to seize it and hold it, 
while the main assault of the Canadian left wing, avoid- 
ing the swamp altogether there, was to attack along the 
Goudberg spur. This plan of action was carried out, but 



THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS 461 

not without hard fighting round Vine Cottage in the 
swamp. All day yesterday there was very little news of 
that fight, for a long time no news. The headquarters of 
the brigade was having a hard time under intense shell- 
fire, and had lost many signallers and runners. The men 
in the swamp had no communication with the rest of the 
battle-front, and fought their fight alone and unseen. It 
was a hard and bloody little action. The German garrison 
of Vine Cottage fought with great courage and desper- 
ately, not making any sign of surrender, and using their 
machine-guns savagely. By working through the swamp 
and getting on short rushes to close quarters, the Cana- 
dians were able at last to close round this blockhouse and 
storm it. The survivors of the garrison then surrendered, 
and they numbered forty men. Meanwhile on the high 
road of Goudberg the main left wing of the Canadian 
troops took the ground that was once Meetscheele village 
in their first wave of assault, and afterwards closed round 
iMosselmarkt. Here in the desert of shell-craters and 
wreckage there were some concrete cellars and forts, one 
of them being used as a battalion headquarters and another 
as a field dressing-station. Over a hundred prisoners were 
gathered in from this neighbourhood, not in big batches, 
but scattered about the ground in shell-craters and cellars. 
Three German field-guns v^^ere captured, with other 
trophies, including stores of ammunition. It will never be 
known how many prisoners were taken yesterday. Many 
of them never reached our lines, and never will. They 
were killed by their own barrage-fire, which swept over all 
this territory when the enemy knew that he had lost it. 
Rain fell- in the afternoon, and more heavily to-day, in 
sudden storms which are broken through at times by bursts 
of sunshine gleaming over all the wet fields, so that there 
is far visibility until the next storm comes and all the land- 
scape of war is veiled in mist. It is a dreary and tragic 
landscape, and though I have seen four autumns of war 
and the long, wet winters of this Flemish country, the 



462 FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE 

misery of it and the squalor of it struck me anew to-day, 
as though I saw it with fresh eyes. In all this country 
round Ypres, still the capital of the battlefields, holding 
in its poor, stricken bones the soul of all this tragedy, and 
still shelled — yesterday very heavily — by an enemy who 
even now will not let its dust alone, there is nothing but de- 
struction and the engines of destruction. The trees are 
smashed, and the ground is littered with broken things, and 
the earth is ploughed into deep pits and furrows by three 
years of shell-fire, and it is all oozy and liquid and slimy. 
Our Army is like an upturned ant-heap in all this mud, 
and in the old battle-grounds they have dug themselves in 
and built little homes for themselves and settled down to 
a life of industry between one shell-crater and another, and 
one swamp and another, for the long spell of winter war- 
fare which has now enveloped them, and while they are 
waiting for another year of war, unless Peace comes with 
the Spring. 



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